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

The car stopping, upon an instant, suddenly in front of you,
the earth tremor that too is a manner of speaking,
the field parting immeasurably deep that the elk cannot cross,
the tree that the wind brings nearly to the ground,
the great, black lettering in the newspaper rack,
the madness that spreads and spreads upon some light wind.

Those who disagree
are left upon the chair or upon the floor
or will join the loud, repeated steps
behind the colourful, wind-blown, heraldic banners into the field-
the thousands pushing against thousands,
tank treads in the loud, thick mud,
the slow, sky-filling, brilliant explosion...

And the immense, dark planes lift, one after another
from the asphalt, between runway lights
into a gray, fragmenting mist, a great wind,
to gain that altitude above the countries
above the warehouses and the railroad centers
and those living their lives carelessly in the streetlights.

And those who fall into the dust, whose heart stains through the shirt, bleeding into the dust. Forever there.
The television distracting from the corner, gleaming grimly.
The great, impenetrable, indestructible machine with tractor treads.
The racket of the helicopter propeller blades in grassless lands.

It is a vast, vacuous rhetoric that imperils us like a vortex.
Clouds illuminating a city of columns and whitened citizens
of statues upon white steps, and the derelicts,
the likenesses of senators, of stucco over a wire frame,
the unusually thin dogs in the streets,
a public clock upon a white wall,
the hands already moving
rapidly toward twelve.