I saw the headline’s single word
And knew what it would tell;
While others turned towards the page,
I knew the story well.
A newspaper upon the desk,
An English test that day;
A simple task to read the text
And answer carefully.
Yet as the lines unfolded there,
The ordinary page
Became a door through which there stepped
The sorrow of an age.
Before the questions could be read,
My tears had first begun;
For I already knew the tale
Of what the spoil had done.
My classmates met that name anew,
Its grief for them unknown;
Yet line by line their faces changed
As they made it their own.
We grew up through the Troubles' years,
With bomb and gun and fear;
The evening news brought death enough
To every home and ear.
We heard of hatred’s bitter work,
Of shootings, loss and blame;
Yet here the grief reached deeper still,
Familiar, not the same.
For here no faction claimed the dead,
No cause, no flag, no side;
Just children sitting down at school—
Hope itself was buried.
The classroom fell to quietness,
The test was all but gone;
The tears that started with but one
Soon glistened on us all.
Now sixty years since Aberfan,
Yet still that name can span
The years, and take me back to school,
Where first those tears began.
A note
In 1991, twenty-five years after the disaster, our class in Northern Ireland was handed a routine English comprehension test. The moment my eyes met the single word Aberfan, I knew the tragedy that lay beneath it—though most of my classmates did not.
Growing up in the shadow of the Troubles, we were no strangers to news of violence and loss, but as the text unfolded, the room fell into a profound silence. Thirty-five years after that morning, this poem is a reflection on how a distant Welsh disaster reached across time and geography into our classroom, and how a shared, quiet grief united us all.
P.S. My connection to Wales was planted early by a couple I affectionately knew as Nain and Taid, who gave me a cherished copy of ‘Gelert and the Wolf’ which I still value today. Years later as an adult, trips down to Cornwall would take me up through Beddgelert, always bringing that book and those memories back to mind. It is part of why I still try to learn Welsh on Duolingo today—a quiet thread connecting my childhood, that silent classroom in 1991, and the place that holds such a deep piece of my heart.
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