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

Blubbery in the stern,
she wobbles with her spoils exotica
plucked from the wadis of the Nile,
the screes of Judea.
Billowing three hundred feet of fleshy sail,
she bears a rich and pungent cargo
bound for Rome.

Our ship is a slaver and a gamey Slut,
flashing stink the way dying men
ripen on a tree.

Losing balance when high winds ruffle her tail,
she sinks to knobby knees and with a screeching thump,
howls piteously. Proud old beast, mindful of the past,
she rights herself in the rolling rough and recuperates.
Scarred, insulted by the rigors of the sea,
Slut is moderately safe, though she leaks in the rain.

There are some who say this decaying tramp,
and others like her in the Roman arsenal,
are literally falling apart,
that a mighty squall is brewing in the east,
one that will take her down.
The cynical say
Slut is just another squalid tub,
hardly a vehicle of destiny.

High Sherif Saulus Paulus commands this ship,
prophetically anointed by his own two hands
in what he calls an act of faith,
a new world order.

To Jews who’ve dined on imperial lash,
he is a quisling and a stooge,
selling leather tents to legionnaires
for immense sums of loot,
with the usual kickback offerings.

He is a Jew who hates himself, hates his parents,
past, every inch of memory, and so conveniently converts,
and cozies up to goyim.
His consuming desire is for lower class kikes
to perish on the cross.

He prowls through the bowels of the Slut,
hurling propaganda
at forty Jewish slaves, his former critics,
chained to the bulkheads of the ship.

“Repent!” he screams into their ears.
“Believe in Yayzu Christus, son, and saviour!
If you persist in Jewish pride, deny the resurrection,
feel rage inside the lion’s mouth.
Be crucified!”

He strikes these sullen brutes
and beats them with a stick,
a shepherd’s crook.
Familiar with his spittled screed,
the Pauline Perils of the Damned,

they mock his paranoia with their own kaddish croak,
the martyr’s vision of imminent truth.

“End! End!” the prophet shrieks at them,
“This world is coming to an end!”