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

Out, walking, to where this church
Lies stranded, like a cuttlefish bone
Near where the school of drinkers
Surrounds an eroded tomb.
Small fossils show through

And in sulphur-rich city air
Stone is ground down to a dusty
Meal of light. In the sun
This darkened brickwork-province
Is ribbed like the intertidal

Sand on an afternoon beach.
Buddleia, high on the station wall
Has fastened itself to the leagues of soot.
Inside, the small metal buttresses
Picked out in white are secular angels.

There are timetables trains
Seek to read their fate in,
A voice croaking over an intercom
While the carriage window produces
Its smoked glass effect.

The Orthodox is here
Reading his Torah - we have paused
At a vandal-proofed station set down
Like an emplacement
Of spears in alien territory.

On the far side children are scholars
Of the word of the street and over
A table of shallow green a single
Alsatian weaves in and out
Of the carriages’ dawdling movement -

Now nearby a palace of windows
And over the dogshit grass
Playing football with the Alsatian,
He hears distant planes, the muffled
Package destinations.

Sad town, a paper
Dwindling back to leaf -
The dust sheen on a broken window
Dull-shining is like the black
Hair on the dog’s arched back

As I float down avenues of lime and chestnut
And I’m my own
Unique and solitary witness,
Such walking a nostalgia for the
Delight not weighted with meaning.

I can take out a piece to label
As if it were something authentic.
It is hard to stay wordless -
Description, it’s like
Laying siege, to an emptying fortress.