Poet's tribute to Brits

so everything they mean to summon up
is always just too far, just out of reach,
unless our memories give time the slip
and learn the lessons that heart-wisdoms teach

of how in grief we find a way to keep
the dead beside us as our time goes on -
invisible and silent, but the deep foundations of ourselves, our corner-stone

Poet Laureate Andrew Motion today attended the September 11 memorial service at Westminster Abbey and read his new poem dedicated to the victims. He said approaching the subject of the atrocities in verse was "extremely difficult".

"Anyone writing a poem about anything is likely to fall short of the subject, but if the subject is of this kind of scale and significance, then that danger is raised to a particular level," he said earlier today.

"Because of the monstrous heap of suffering that this event is, it is very difficult for someone writing about it, or approaching it in any artistic way, not to look as though they are somehow aggrandising themselves at the expense of their subjects," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

He added: "It seemed important to me to write something detached. By that, I don't mean unfeeling but I do mean classical and austere.

"I wanted to write something that might have been chiselled on a stone over 100 years ago."

Queen pays tribute to victims