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

The needle-point’s swaying reminder
     Teeters at thirty, and the flexed foot
Keeps it there. Kerb-side signs
     For demolitions and new detours,
A propped pub, a corner lopped, all
     Bridle the pressures that guide the needle.

I thought I knew this place, this face
     A little worn, a little homely.
But the look that shadows softened
     And the light could grace, keeps flowing away from me
In daily change; its features, rendered down,
     Collapse expressionless, and the entire town

Sways in the fume of the pyre. Even the new
     And mannerless high risers tilt and wobble
Behind the deformations of acrid heat —
     A century’s lath and rafters. Bulldozers
Gobble a street up, but already a future seethes
     As if it had waited in the crevices:

A race in transit, a nomad hierarchy:
     Cargoes of debris out of these ruins fill
Their buckled prams; their trucks and hand-carts wait
     To claim the dismantlings of a neighbourhood —
All that a grimy care from wastage gleans,
     From scrap-iron down to heaps of magazines.

Slowing, I see the faces of a pair
     Behind their load: he shoves and she
Trails after him, a sexagenarian Eve,
     Their punishment to number every hair
Of what remains. Their clothes come of their trade —
     They wear the cast-offs of a lost decade.

The place had failed them anyhow, and their pale
     Absorption staring past this time
And dusty space we occupy together,
     Gazes the new blocks down — not built for them;
But what they are looking at they do not see.
     No Eve, but mindless Mnemosyne,

She is our lady of the nameless metals, of things
     No hand has made, and no machine
Has cut to a nicety that takes the mark
     Of clean intention — at best, the guardian
Of all that our daily contact stales and fades,
     Rusty cages and lampless lampshades.

Perhaps those who have climbed into their towers
     Will eye it all differently, the city spread
In unforeseen configurations, and living with this,
     Will find that civility I can only miss — and yet
It will need more than talk and trees
     To coax a style from these disparities.

The needle-point’s swaying reminder
     Teeters: I go with uncongealing traffic now
Out onto the cantilevered road, window on window
     Sucked backwards at the level of my wheels.
Is it patience or anger most renders the will keen?
     This is a daily discontent. This is the way in.