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

It isn't true we end where we started from -
in between, we've made it worse,
we who can rip but can never caress,
slobbering for what we say is ours, or is not this.
Such eyes as we have left are furnaces
peering to the head of the column,
where flutters the bright banner of the law,
knowledge our wisdom, justice our truth, power our strength,
and we shall overcome with hooks for hands.

We stumble on, among the rhinocerotic horses, guns and
a long train of baggage. We have deferred,
discounted hope and rest and all soft things and at
night dice for promises we shall not keep at dawn
(which is when the sergeant says it is).
We march between urgent fires that once were farms,
fountains, libraries. Within our throats
morningstars multiply - not that we feel them.
And yet we have hooks for hands.

I think that I may once have spoken French, or was it
German? Sarge says the General knows Latin and Greek.
Nowadays one rasp expectorant serves to say
war, world, man. I find my way more by my
wounds than my eyes. In a smash of stones our cannon had
kissed, I found a cup and plate of emerald which
I would have looted, they might have come in handy, hadn't
the sergeant just then given the order - but I doubt
I could have pulled them out in any case,
with hooks for hands.

We make a junction with another
company, in uniforms much like our own, who salute us
eagerly, and we see that their arms are crowned with
hands. Now we shall know swift success. We
bite open our blister-packs to get out the laughter. But
Sarge is everywhere, in the horses' breath, in the slow-
match, in my mind and in yours and yours and yours,
barking: can't you see? They have hands - hands!
Hands! These are our enemy, who disrespect us and
all laws of war. Get among them boys, we have
iron and iron again, and they have only hands.