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

A cruelty of abrupt departure; one solid fixture
gone from the swirling kaleidoscope’s corner,
the vast swirling pictures of pubescent security,
half understood and ever unstable.
We subsisted our way through the sudden erections,
the fearsome eruptions to red sweats and shames
and untold legions of adult controllers
authorised, apparently, to trample our freedoms.
We travelled the daily dirt ride of learning,
snatching for scraps from high favoured tables
like rats in a scramble. We already knew
about gangsters and pirates and slime politicians
bouncing about on our sad daily saddles.

But this was a novel and terrible lesson,
raping our frail grasp of kindness and justice.
An amiable man, tall, fair and honest,
undemonstratively distinguished
like a solid officer in control of the gates
to be arbitrarily taken from all that he knew,
leaving his children and lady alone
as lovers, suddenly lost in the fairground,
with the wide jaunty smiles on gilt golden horses
twisted to grins of grotesque schadenfreude.
We stood in assembly, even after the hymns,
for once, lost in thought, as if a miasma
of serious doubt had swept over the hall.
Merciful God, was this all your mercy,
was this anywhere in the twee tinkling tunes
that we sang to Jesus on cough-shuffling mornings
between the grins, the sniffs and the scratchings?
They saw our eyes raising, up there on the platform,
they saw we were sharing affectionate memories
even while forming unanswerable questions.