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

Is there not anyone, not anyone,
No trespasser upon this solitude,
That seems to know itself, nor any sun
But its own globe of blood,
Whose error hath no bourne, nor sickliness its end?

No trespasser? If any, say, 'Pass, friend!'
No, call him to us, friends—perchance his lips
Yet smile remembrance of proud skies and seas,
Where golden ships
Are set for ever to their voyages;
Hands, voices, pennons hail them from the shore,
And they stride on, shaking their bellied store
Of lucent sail-cloth, firm at every rope,
Sail on in hope.

We have forgotten. Looking each on each,
We see us strangers, not of this strange gloom;
And fragments of a speech,
A tongue no longer ours,
Come like these old ghost-faces from their tomb,
Come through the clang that cleaves the walls of towers
Where they make bottles, boots or cigarettes,
Or artificial flowers,
Where clamour hammer, crank, reel, mould, forge, loom
—Atlantis, England—exquisite regrets!

And each to each looks changed,
That ranged
(Radiant we were) years—was it years?—ago,
Through fields of snow,
And early pines to manhood sanctified,
When Dawn walked there with God's wound in his side.
And now we are brought low, brought very low,
Chivalric favours lost from our proud caps,
In the mire perhaps.
It is all one: beauty is in his grave.
We have made grace a sin, and love a name,
Each against slavery and its ways of shame
Blasphemous, and ten thousand times a slave.
Before we cannot see; upward we strain,
And see the stars that bleed;
Downward the reeking plain,
The asphalt floor of Hell set underneath
Our pain,
Our need,
Shares its fell secret with an air like death.
Plagued, nightmare-ridden by a million lusts,
Thonged, darkened, outlawed from our own,
And here unknown,
Pushed by the vapours agonised downthrusts,
Too far submerged to call the land we left,
In what high quest we can no longer think,
Of tears bereft,
Is there no one to lead us to the brink
Of some sheer chasm, even to cast us in?
(We dream no more to win
The treasure, whose fable came, that we began
To seek it, deemed it even already won.)
There is not anyone, not anyone
That can.