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

This stretch of cliffpath, nowadays patrolled
Only by seagulls, each rise and descent
Shaping reflections in the sinuous mould
Of Henry Moore or Celtic ornament,
Swings beyond plough and fallow to a past
Before Napoleon, before life’s old
Ironist mused how dying Keats had come
To Lulworth Cove, a few miles east
Of here, before Wessex emerged, or some

Legion or other stormed the hillfort there
And settled down to four safe centuries
Of sentry-go on this far frontier,
Unnatural calm, as if no Channel breeze
Could ever reach galeforce from France or Spain
Or mass black clouds and thicken the sea air,
A past so present on these ramparts that
Treading the working of earth’s grain
We feel this bluff’s being reared up, wrenched apart.

Sometimes I stop to peer or shelter in
What fifty years ago was an alert
Pillbox or lookout post.  I caught a man
Scanning the view through the machine-gun slit
Once when I’d scrambled round to get inside.
There may have been a sudden burst of rain,
Or need to pee, that drove us in.  We stood
Watching the drama of high tide -
‘As if’, he said, knowing some history could

Defend us from whatever it did then.
Neglected brambles now, as then barbed wire
Or camouflage, break up the concrete’s line
And crumbling angularity.  Crossfire,
He added, from this siting or that cliff
Would make the beach between, when primed with mine
And boobytrap, as now with tackle and
Bright boats, tricky to land on - if
Coastal defences ever were remanned.