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

1

By the pediment of the nurse in the stone uniform
Are exposed spring flowers for the South African dead.
I have to ask myself what these commemorate
To those who laid them
Under the rhetoric, Brussels Dawn etcetera.
(They had seen a newspaper photograph
Of the corpses near Vereeniging.)

To me those primroses, that bouquet wrapped in cellophane,
Do not salute dead women and men.
They bear witness
To one of the more accessible of serious
Attitudes, if not the easiest —
Indignation at oppression and oppressors
By those who are neither the oppressors nor oppressed.
An ode for those dead is the subject of the competition
In this week’s New Statesman.
I do not question
Such credentials of emotion
But examine
What, in fact, the pathetic wreaths and odes condemn.

2

The armoured Saracen? Police with rifles?
The sjambok of Farmer Legree?
I would go beyond unoriginal images
To the original sin.
Why not ask the melodramatics of History
Did wagons groan over the Berg, cross Orange and Vaal
After Blood River and Weenen,
Did Rhodes buy dominion with diamonds,
Did the redcoat kopje fall
For so little achievement —
Automobiles heading for Hartebeestepoort Dam and the National Park,
The beaches of Muizenberg, the Royal Johannesburg Golf Club?

Is the architecture of the Voortrekker Monument and Houghton Estate,
Megapolis, dorp, stroom, and fontein where Hope condoles
The skins of dead lions with the mounted horns of antelopes —
Is a whole civilization of khaki shorts, cement, and tin eaves
Stinkwood furniture in stoeps, infants’ footwear eternized in bronze,
Dinners at which madeira is served with the joint,
Bourgeois, puritan, eaten with provincial boredom,
(Do you recognize the picture, allowing for local idiosyncracies?)
About to commit hara-kiri for a serious proposition,
Keep the black man out of the lavatory?

3

It is of no concern to the enormous
And simple landscape, used to congregations
(Her living comedy will not occur again,
Her assemblies of impala and sable
Slaughtered by the rifle of Roualeyn Cummings,
Of the epigoni of Selous;
She is pinned with windpumps, has her bowels rummaged).

4

Out there, I was born in a suburb, in Johannesburg;
And I scan the line of Magaliesberg still in my mind.
The far contour, I cannot forget it, the bluer vein
At the base of the dome of the air; nor the clouding morning
Of many a day of summer. The vapoury bales
Afloat on a high ocean, together crowding,
Till, swelling with bruising thunder, by four p.m.
They form a discoloured heaven. I feel the preluding
Wind at the level of the grass blow suddenly chill,
The first drop fall, the olympian stupendous orchestra
Strike. And the dithyramb of the first movement.

5

For we are to apprehend the operation of Justice.
Should I urge the repeal of several Acts of Parliament
Or merely observe that as population increases
So do the number and criminality of various legal actions
Performed by bodies of men on the bodies of men?
Or should I say that for a decision taken in 1717
Preferring cheap slaves to paid labour
History exacts and has enacted
Retribution at compound interest, payable in current debasement?
We are to apprehend the operation of Justice.

6

Chevrolet-borne, at night, on the main road from Pretoria,
The tumble of chaos defined by horizons of fire,
Long red flickering worms pasturing on dip and rise
At the time of the burning of the veld (a Sunday picnic is over)
We are crossing the Transvaal tableland on humming tyres;
From the back of a homing car I look at a winternight world
Of darkness and fire and stars and a headlight probing
Solitude and a spool of macadam.
It is a wonderful world and a comfortable car
And there is somebody looking after the fires.
But now on the last rise of the road from Pretoria
Lit promontories master the dark:
A city in chains of light trembles below the eye,
Sydenham, Saxonwold, and Auckland Park.

7

The bones of Piet Retief and those betrayed with him,
Provisional heroes of a negative idea,
Are entablatured to establish at Pretoria
The invisible emotional meridian.

All paradoxes flourish in a land
Of grand guignol and comic opera:
The fanatic vision in converse with greed,
Contact with reality equals high treason.

Thus the just man in suburban degradation
Corrupts; those who are harried harry themselves;
The moderate become victims of their moderation;
Those who label themselves European turn their backs on Europe;
Those upon whom they have inflicted debasement know who is debased.

8

Under the African lintel, Table Mountain,
The violet ship at the quay
Casts off, the laughing sentimentalists hold her
Momentarily with coloured streamers
As she moves out to sea.
The paper ribbons part and flutter; and the crowd
Puts forth its handkerchiefs like leaves.

The African continent leans against the peninsula.
In hallways at Kalk Bay
Fishing-tackle waits beside a salt-stained surf-board;
The electric trains flicker by
Washed colonial gables, rainweary oakwoods,
And expensive small hotels,
Stucco villas elbowing for maritime vistas.

O spectacular home of mediocre visionaries
The mailboat draws away
From one of the more terrifying middleclass paradises
Of the shut mind and eye.
I wave from the deck of the Union-Castle liner,
And an exile waves from the quay.
Why do we love the places we were born in?