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

i
I wasn’t eager to go
to the bombing-school near Paradis,
but learned to tramp the muddy roads,
to live in trenches, wash
in a biscuit-tin.

ii
We stared into confusion.
From the firesteps tried our longest throws
with Mills bombs
- like unlucky boys
whose game of ducks and drakes
turned one day serious.

iii
Few people on the streets of Ypres,
but the red post-office remained,
advertisements for Sunlight Zeep,
for Singer’s Naaimachinen,
and fragments of the cathedral gateway
where parchment of old music lay
scattered amongst legless wicker chairs.

iv
Shells burst around us with a flat
pattering percussion of continual sound.
Then silence, and the solitude recaptured
a wilderness of windowed walls.

v
The open space all through the Salient
was crammed with men,
with animals, with transport.
Like a circus-ground.

vi
Port Arthur where we found
amongst the broken spades and empty tine
a muddy pair of soldier’s boots
– still containing someone’s feet.

vii
Our cheerful young lance-corporal
was making tea that afternoon.
                                                 A shell
dropped on a sudden from blue sky.
I turned, and when the smoke dispersed
the boy was gobbets of black flesh,
the earthwall sotted with his blood.
Bits of pulpy bone.A single eye
stared from the duckboard.

viii
Another dawn, and rain.
We trudged ahead.
The latest German missile
with a shriek burst over us,
exploded in the mud,
rocked all the earth around,
the air itself.
My twenty-first year
had come and gone
with mud, and gas,
and high explosives.