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

When he climbed the twenty-seven steps to the cathedral
he had found himself confronted
by a stone-faced woman, scraped black hair,
who didn’t want to let him in.
So he had started saying how he only needed slides,
and maybe posters, for this talk he had to give
and, slowly, she relented as a faint smile cracked
dry features. ‘Why didn’t you say so right away?’

Most of the girls were at the party, where
he moved through faces, brushing against
their skinny shoulders, slick with sweat,
knowing the men who came to shake his hand admiringly
were, almost certainly, the ones he shouldn’t trust.
There was this exercise they’d tried to teach him -
some technique whereby you could, supposedly,
impose your will; but it had never worked for him
- or only on those whose acquiescence
seemed like more of an embarrassment.

While she kept thinking - somewhere,
between our learning how to live like lizards in the sun,
conserving energy and doing nothing for so long a time,
yet staying ready, should the need arise,
to move, to strike, even with venom and all speed -
somewhere among all this - beyond the drinking
and the lying, and the laying down in sticky dresses -
surely, somewhere amongst it all
I have the right to be a person...

Somewhere out there - out in the stricken,
god-feared land beyond the river,
beyond the swollen, carcase-carrying river,
sludgy with silt and waste and broken crates,
who knows what other strong brown stuff -
somewhere out there, the plane came down.
The way she heard it, they had never found
the pilot or the cargo.