Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

   Beneath the main body of the Law Courts is
   Dead Man’s Passage. The high walls are covered
   with glazed white tiles like a Victorian Public
   Lavatory. As the condemned man is led towards
   his place of execution the passage gradually
   becomes lower and narrower until he’s wedged
   so closely his feet can only move forward.

Listen! A warmth, a restlessness, a humming
under the floor, bodies are thrusting
against each other, bees
diverted from their obvious exit –
gaps in the tile-hung wall, where they could
catapult themselves into the air, shoot
in straight lines at top speed roaring their wings,
punch holes in the clouds, their black dots
crossing recrossing the sun’s surface –

Hustled by some rogue leader – leaderless
they are lost – they have crept instead
into the darkness between joists
so that now when they bite their way up through
the felt sealing the boards against draughts
or noise the room is closed with no way out, and
for a while they shrill their wings, batter their heads
against the window-panes not seeing the glass
slotted between them and the sky. They
hum and bounce in electronic storms and hopeless
die leaving the place spotted with dung
and a stench like warm-blooded carnivores
several days postmortem –

All this because their instincts
wouldn’t allow them to turn back the way
they had come – though carrion moths can fly
straight into a spider’s web, snatch
a wrapped cadaver and quickly reverse
their wings before the sticky silk grabs them
and the spider comes running out jaws wide, all
its black eyes shining like wet molasses.