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

Past Rakos again, dusk descending:
Two horses, statuesque, stilled in a meadow:
Sandbags of the Spanish base camouflaged

Next to the torched skeletons of cabs and tankers,
A ribwork of girders,
All awash in swift rust: that burnt white Zastava

Run aground at the frozen yield of a junction,
Mottled and ash-wealed, still ghosting
The death-ride’s forking to the big site in the pines

Like the metempsychosis of a terrible time
Fleeing the flash-fireball of its moment:
Prairie dusk, descending

The bend by the sign, I motioned
The driver to stop. Exactly what was
I hoping for, standing

Here again? What loss already? Between Pec and Istok
Under purplish Montana-gaze
Of the Accursed Mountains, we had turned back

To Pristina. Whatever it was, it was after
The hour in Istok; when I leant over the wavering weir
That moated the restaurant’s octagonal isle

Myriads of dark trout rose and flickered
To my peering shadow
As if a flock of swifts flicking its being

To a charm of glimmers. Beer and linen had brought us
Back from the dead; but now, moving off
Towards the taxi, two teenagers materialized

To bring us back to two-hours-back. Gestures. What?
Afrim? Not Afrim? What, then? Spine? Skull?
A girl? Yes. Unidentified... ? Of course. Yesterday

The Australian from the Tribunal:
We are not a body removal operation
If the evidence is immaterial. Little orphan corpse,

Resurrected in memory, excuse me the nod
That fetched their shovel down the road,
That let them scrape at the shallow clods

And lift a binbag hem from the tresses at your nape,
That gave me to shift just a jot
The black plastic shrouding the hollow of your ribs,

Then for the longest of seconds to look upon
The monkey-grimace of your baby teeth
In the o of their parchment mask;

Though, later,
The voice of truth would whisper
As our car passed a boy with a whittled wooden pitchfork,

The moon hung high and pure and full
Over gloaming’s prairieland lit by wildfires: confront it
As one would any other, that thing you have become forever.