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

                                     III
                                   1958

‘Run! Run!’ The toddler knows that sound of urgency,
Starts, is afraid. How yet again will her little legs
Carry her up the yawning stairs,
Move fast enough for the frantic, labouring mother?
She lifts her head. The girders stalk above the tracks
Like stilted giants, holding the vaults
In their arms as offerings. The climb begins.
No risers to the wooden treads.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Try not to conjure
What moves obscurely underneath: black disk
Of tunnel, commuters at impossible angles,
Bright gorse jamming down the cutting’s bank.
Her mother lunges. No time to lose.
‘Listen! Hear it coming?’ Behind the trees
Shrieks steam heart, dragon breath, anvil

Of cumulo-nimbus rising. The slats beneath her feet
Begin to gape. Away, along an endless ribbon
Bounds her mother. ‘Over the bridge! Come on! Come on!’
Uplifted now her exhortations
As the child measures, leaps from arc to arc
Across the rungs of infinity, furnaces snapping below.

                     *                    *                     *

What are the trackways in the sky we trudge?
Pinstripes loom and shove. Over Shooter’ s Hill
The hunters cock their rifles; Peek Frean
Caramels the air. And all below the rows and rows
Of backyards: green walls leaking,
A grimy curtain flapping on a roof.
And stencilled Lucifers, ‘the best for lighting’
Sprout between buddleia and dandelion.
Beneath the bridges stow second-hand cars
And dubious bibelots; we squint at snail’s pace
Along the tower blocks’ peeling walkways;
The wagon’s undercarriage grinces
Against its parapets like a demolished beauty.

O spindly city, silent upon your gantries,
Desert warehouses, your blackened quaysides
And cathedrals lost below the line of vision
As you railroad in to London Bridge and Cannon Street,
Indifferent with your curse or benedicat,
Lake fortress, houri siren, amphitheatre of pain,
Make us listen underneath the arches:
Hold them to our ear like conches,
Hear their inextinguishable cry.