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

Cycling with the traffic
from Waterloo towards the Strand,
I stop at a red light
where a man and his young son
hesitate, so the anxious father
can consult his London tourist map.

Like me, they’ve just crossed a bridge
that does not any more connect us
with its ends or its beginnings,
a river that somehow does.

Behind us on one bank,
the spoils of distant war,
echoes of cannon and cavalry,
British Grenadiers in squares;
somewhere just ahead,
a long lost beach, phantom tides,
the splash of Saxon oars;
but louder than either,
the oooh’s and aaah’s, mid-river,
from the grandstanding crowds,
when we first packed today’s more concrete span
to launch the Festival South Bank,
fireworks overhead reflecting colour
back into our upturned, post-war faces;
smoking salvoes re-echoing the Blitz,
cannoning forward off the coming Silver Jubilee,
Millennium, backwards again
to earlier Jubilees, VE, VJ,
Mafeking - and Waterloo.

The boy at the traffic light
is only five or maybe six;
hears none of this; raises
his face earnestly towards his father,
sure that map and parent
have all the answers.

When I was five,
my father brought me up to London,
ran for a moving bus beyond my reach,
and hopped aboard.
I watched him pull away -
and howled him back to me again.

The trick worked then. Today,
looking at father and son beside the lights,
I know the map turns blank,
the bus will pull away, and the boy
must face the traffic on his own:
routes, crossings, short cuts,
hurt spaces

where the river, charted mid flow,
engages with the hard corners of the city;
lays down a begging arm,
bent, palm uppermost, slack,
only for each sharp bridge
to slash it pink,
each pointed spire to nail it down,
haemorrhage the spreading stain
down tide;

while the boy that was,
raising his head one day at dusk,
will find himself back on this city bridge -
upstream beyond the Wheel
a lingering sun; downstream, he knows,
the darkening sea.