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

S the insignia was printed on grey paving
slabs in fading white sans serif upper case
before every few houses along Acooba
Woad, Ayvatwee, Ipperpool Fifteen,
which was how I said my address when
old enough to toddle. It stood for my
name and so the land called for me.

S maybe stood for houses that would someday
be mine, I thought, as I tried not to tread on the
lines and so stay in A A Milne’s good books
lest the lions get me. Or perhaps they were
something to do with hopscotch. But no, all
the hopscotch marks were in chalk and got
rained off like cricket. So I thought that S

was perhaps something to do with sewers
and where they were, like you sometimes
found signs that were to do with gas and
water and electricity, but why did such
a little road need so many sewers? No, it
didn’t make sense, and so I used the last
resort and, aged seven, asked mother about the S

“S? It’s where the Andersons and Morrisons
live to enshrine what is left of the living proof
against shrapnel but not against a direct hit
so if you’re in one and a bomb lands on it
you’re blown to bits just the same, but we
find the bits, the arms and legs, the heads
and torsos and bury them and when you see S

you’ll see it’s white and that's so you can see it
in a blackout when all the lights are off and the
only light is from our houses burning and
the searchlights we use to find them and the
flak we shoot to kill them, for the land calls
out for them and we call out for them and cheer
from Andersons behind houses with a white S

marked on the slabs where they come to join us,
where their thudding bombers rush to join us and
then we emerge with consciences of guilt to roads
and streets bunged up with bits of neighbours' bodies
and people’s homes because our sirens tell us All is
Clear until tomorrow night when it recurs. That,
I hope, has answered your concerns about the S."

I thought differently of S's after that: avoided them,
and worried less about the lines and AA Milne, but
weather and the soles of thousands wore them out,
and if today you tread Acuba Road in Wavertree in
Liverpool 15 you will, alas, find none. Time erodes,
too, the last contemporaries of the souls of thousands,
but my daughter will never have to worry about an S.