In 2017, a terrorist detonated a bomb in Manchester Arena at an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22 and injuring 1017 people. I was living in Manchester and wrote this poem a few years later about the experience of public mourning and memorial that happened in the aftermath as Mancunians came together in St Anne’s Square to remember the dead and injured, many of them young girls.

The poem is about the insufficiency of language to mark such a horror.