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

Back then, no-one would have called him that. No feature, no practice,
no seven-branched candlestick, no distinction or distinctiveness
                                                                                    marked him,
not even his name - not Levi but Demartin, not Mordecai but Jacques.

Did someone with a gun at their throat, and a son in the Maquis, seize
a lurching hope - as one might try to soft-soap an ordinary bully,
as I’ll take you to where there are otters, or something else rare
                                                                                      and harmless?

Or, out of no special grievance, out of no previous sense of difference,
maybe into the mouth of some citizen who’d always been anxious
                                                                                       to please
and couldn’t stop now; or into a mind sharp for self-advancement

sprang Jacques Demartin, his name already tempting on the tongue,
a bonne bouche to offer the gauleiter, who snapped him up,
                                                                             though requiring
something more substantial to sate his larger hunger.

But later, no-one wanted to rake over who’d said what;
and because the white-veiled girls were shut up in the church
                                                                                   and burned;
and the boys in their Sunday clothes were rounded up and shot

he hardly counts. So although each year, even now, people
cram into the church, to honour the names of those who could
                                                                                       have been
more to them, teenage great-uncles and aunts, there’s no memorial

to the man in the cobbler’s shop who turned out to be a Jew,
to the way they shouted and spat; to the ancient sway of
                                                                                  his back
as he stuffed a few things in a case, enough for a week or two.

What remained of him after he’d gone north-east up the
                                                                       narrow-gauge track?
An increasingly abstract guilt in some elderly breast? Vague stories.
A small gap: there’s never since been a Jew in Chanterac.