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

In the sixth form or the public library,
Tow-like hair tousled, dangling cigarette,
You waited for us, fiercely
Made us confront our knowledge

That our sick time needed a surgeon’s knife
Wielded by the unwavering hand of Love.
Action, you cried, was urgent,
Though you left its nature vague.

Pricked by your strict and adolescent pen
We hurried to enlist in your commando,
On our journey to Cape Wrath
Moved as through enemy country.

Beyond the ruinous farms and flooded workings
We panted on the foothills of F6
And with kestrel eye surveyed
Europe from snowblocked passes.

Since time was short and later than we knew
We assumed your clipped and cryptic utterance
Littering the landscape with
Dropped articles and pronouns.

As darkness stained the sixteen skies of Europe
The games that you had taught us turned to earnest.
Young men crossed real frontiers,
Their tomorrows a perhaps,

For now that dragon with the scaly tail
Of which you’d warned us spread sun-darkening wings
And many a young man braved him
With inadequate equipment.

So when you disappeared in mid-Atlantic
We knew you’d gone to rally reinforcements
And eagerly we opened
The messages you sent us

In bottles that had held communion wine,
To find them sea-stained and illegible
Except for one that read
All former orders cancelled.

It came too late. Your rover crew were scattered
To Spain, the deserts and the Norman beaches.
For them their lonely day
Held nothing but the struggle.

We later heard you’d rented Rydal Mount
Whence you sent down the tables of the law:
Flee from Cape Wrath to come …
Mine is a nice house, mine is …

Your poems saved no Jews from the gas chambers,
You said. Did it occur to you to wonder
How many young men died
With your orders in their knapsacks?