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

I don’t remember it there, she said, shown
Constable’s ‘Chain Pier at Brighton’.
I don’t remember it  (well she wouldn’t,
blown down before she was born)
though the rest looks the same.  But I’ll
never forget that afternoon, she said.

This merely one more
in a century of technological follies,
pretext for the ‘natural painter’ (sea breeze
nipping his sketchblock)  to put down things
just happening, the pier’s horizontal
precise to hold all in place:

a break of light on the sea, fishing-boats
yawing, waves like curled whiskers, somebody
tugging a line from the sea, a boy mending
nets, his dog’s doggy tongue flicked niftily in,
two women braving the breeze with inadequate
parasol.  The trademark grandstand of cloud.

I’ll never forget that morning, she said,
when news of the Armistice came and we all
cheered and sang.  Nor ever forget that afternoon
word came he was hurt.  It was gas, talking of
technological follies.  He was born
in the century’s end, within view

of where it chained out from the cliff
till the storm had it down in ninety-six -
well, it hardly looks up to the wind and sea
as done by our best man for weather, that pier.
But I’ll never forget the afternoon, she said,
when he came home to nextdoor-but-one:

sent out in March of ’18
(himself only just turned nineteen),
over the top (the 2nd battalion Yorks and Lancs)
for Fresnoy, the Hindenberg Line - six times all told
and surviving, blown clean up a tree in October.
Laid up at Rouen on Armistice Day.  All Sandhill
Crescent stepped over to shake his hand.

I’ll never forget that afternoon, she said,
salt in the breeze, fishing-boats yawing, someone
shuttling at net.   There, she said, knurled finger
midway marking the clifftop walk,  the ring
still where he had put it that afternoon, things
just happening.
                                       I’ll never, she said