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

     Little of its former splendour had survived the centuries. The roofs had caved in, the walls had crumbled, the mighty arches and buttresses sagged, or lay in heaps among the broken ornaments at their feet. The great stone staircase climbed, like a shambling lunatic, into emptiness. The floors had reared up and cracked. Immense vines throttled and crushed the pillars. The legendary gardens with their fountains full of golden carp were gone. The lawns had become pasture for wild cattle. The moat, on which ladies once sailed under turquoise umbrellas and dipped their fingers in the water, was now a stagnant pool where cranes stepped warily over the debris of sinking promenades.

     Even so, it was a popular spot. The townspeople came in droves. But it was not the picturesque antiquity alone that attracted them. It was the sullen rages of the gate-keeper.

     There he was, toothless, his features stamped with fatigue, his bones as rickety as the stool he sat on, swatting flies and cursing the crowds that violated the sanctity of the palace. No matter that he shouted: ‘Entrance to the palace is forbidden!’ They had always known this, and they no longer cared. Instead, they laughed and roared applause while he hurled, in a fury of hapless frustration, one terrible malediction after another at them. ‘Go to it, old codger!’ they bawled. ‘Let’s have another, we didn’t like that one!’ This was more entertaining by far than the travelling actors who performed their trivial comedies on feast days in the marketplace. The people recognized that this man’s passion was genuine. Indeed it was! His tears came from the depths of his soul. His words carried with them the aura of dead princes, of doors banged shut on the secretive lives of vanished courtesans. His words rose from out of a past that meant nothing to them.

     So when they had tired of him, they passed, in jubilant disobedience, over the bridge and into the palace grounds. They stole the ornaments, they picnicked in the overgrown gardens, defecated in the moat, scratched their names into the stonework. Their children brawled in the parched lotus ponds. They profaned the altars with their uproar, pushed over what was toppling and with their feet wore away the sacred mosaics.

     In the end, acknowledging the fruitlessness of his labours, the gate-keeper took to his bed and pulled the blanket over his face. He refused to budge. He refused to eat, despite the urgings of the village women who brought him soup and bread. Occasionally, a group of onlookers would stand in the doorway, hoping that he might leap from his bed and start to harangue them once more. He never did. Consequently, even this residue of interest dwindled, and, though his memory as an object of fun was kept alive, he himself was quickly forgotten.

     Until, one day, a visitor called and sat down at the old man’s bedside. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how long have you kept watch over the ancient palace?’ ‘Since my youth,’ came the reply from under the blanket. ‘And how,’ the visitor continued, ‘did you happen upon this employment?’ The old gate-keeper was seen to shrug his shoulders. ‘I inherited it from my father, and he from his.’ ‘It is as I thought,’ the visitor murmured. He leant closer. ‘One last thing I should like to know,’ he spoke in hardly more than a whisper, as if someone were eavesdropping, or the question involved a betrayal. ‘What was this ancient decree which you have struggled so hard to uphold? No one could prevent the palace falling into ruins. Even if they could, the princes whose home it was lie dead, their graves are unmarked, their issue dispersed in the wider world. If the decree was only to keep strangers out, the passage of time had long ago made it both unnecessary and ridiculous. I cannot believe that you would have exhausted yourself in so worthless a cause. Surely, it must have been something more reverential than that?’ The old gate-keeper fetched a deep sigh. ‘There was never any secret about it, just that no one before you ever troubled to ask. My duty was a simple one: it was to preserve the imperial silence.’

     A lengthy pause followed this announcement. Darkness fell. At last, the visitor rose and crossed to the window from which the shadows of the ancient palace could be seen. The night birds sang. In the moonlight, naked girls waved their legs, and their youthful lovers arched their backs in ecstasy.