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

     The child sat alone, in the centre of a vast empty plain. The plain was barren and icy cold, and winds and sleet buffeted the child. The child wept, and turned his awkward head from side to side, but there was no-one there. And so he wept even more piteously, but the wind drowned his sobs.

     And as he sat there, alone and uncared for, little specks of ice began to settle on the naked skin of his face and his arms and his legs, and on his thin back as he hunched forward to try and shelter between his own limbs. More and more ice settled on the child until, in tine, he was encased in it from head to toe.

     And then he stumbled to his feet, and, shielded from the whipping pain of the wind by his armour of ice, he started to search for someone to take care of him.

     He walked until the barren plain was far behind him, and he came to a great cold city where crowds of staring people rushed back and forth like the wind. He tried to reach out and touch some of these people, but the ice that encased him was too hard and too cold, and the people he reached out to fell back bruised and bleeding from his touch.

     So he continued to walk. He walked in search of a warm place, a place where the ice which encased him would melt, allowing the child within to touch other people without hurting them. But the longer he searched, walking against the cold wind and the unfeeling sleet, the thicker the ice which encased him became.

     In time, the ice became so thick that it crushed the child inside it. Then there was nothing left at all, except a block of ice in the shape of a child.