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

Carries the idea of a journey
in its stomach
which ends at the ferry terminal
with a metallic taste.

was this meant to be the place?

the guidebook says nothing
about the lady on the quayside
selling gaudy flowers,
day after day
her sad life repeating
next to the signpost for the centre.

further up the street
the map is wrong
or else this is the site
of an ancient monument
which has disappeared completely now.

alone, she looks this way and that
for confirmation.

someone offers to make things real
by taking a photograph.

she clambers up the adverse camber
for a moment
with an event.

‘authentic’ is the word
she was looking for
and she learns it in Turkish.

armed with the truth
she walks all the way
to the museum
but it is shut on Tuesdays.

how was she to know?

time becomes a time-bomb,
a suicide-bomber without a mission,
a futile utility
wanting most to spend itself.

she sits in a restaurant, eats,
asks the waiter to recommend
something worthwhile with
“what is valuable?”

He directs her to the ancient quarter
where everything looks promising
and in ruins.

everyone in the bazaar
is selling the same trash.
hard to stop browsing,
hard to believe
that there is nothing worth buying
amongst all those replicas.

after a long search
through the bric a brac
for what most resembles her
she buys a stylised god
and quarantines its name.

on the way back
the sea commuters
are in an office trance.
their lives are numb
to this feeling
of having found self,
settling on the Bosphorous
like a huge polluted sunset,
this foreign familiar currency.