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

Caught once again!  As  pushing home in the dark
I’m commanded by another traffic light.
Road maintenance delays, testy delays ....
Held here while seeing red I glance across
to Whipsnade Hill where the lion image passant
looks east with what designs on Dunstable?
An electric lion pieced from a line of lamps
beseeching one to call in at the zoo
next week, perhaps, to get plugged into life.
Switched off he just reverts to chalk, scraped bare,
by day a white but slowly greening sign
like carpet mouldering where there’s risen damp.
The lions in the zoo, bred mainly on that site
receive at proper hours their visitors:
they prowl enclosures, grab their hunks of meat
per programme as the keeper forks them in.
The crowds approve, lift children up to see.
Feeding and being fed:  elsewhere and long ago
the weekend boy assistant in a zoo
(when primed with stories, Tsavo’s maneaters)
walked home gone closing-time, no one around,
alongside Billy lion’s narrow cage;
he followed grunting menace through the bars
that spared my live-bait from his angry mouth.
My fear must have signalled but for him I was
protected specie for all that he might do.
Old Billy’s appetite stayed in his cell
regulated by green iron doors on chains.
Just months later Billy folded into death:
his keeper dropped me a sad confidence
about the maggots wrestling in one eye.
Feeding and being fed:  the green-golden syrup tin
still confronts our eating with a lion stretched
out dead but yet possessed by honey bees.
The traffic light seems jammed on red;
oncoming cars continue trickling through.
Beyond its promise my electric lion
has moved no further than those couched in stone
surrounding Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
Three hours ahead in moonlit Serengeti
authentic lions flick attentive ears
at noises in the bush and savour, graze upon,
such odours on the hoof lie within range;
they lick their massive paws with rasping tongues
or so, at least, I have to reconstruct
their living as they peer from magazines
or when they make a leap to claw and kill
a frantic failing zebra on our TV screen
- the Africa in our lounge clicked on and off
whose life we never meet on equal terms.
The hillside mice creep nearer what I know:
on open chalk they should not venture far
and risk being snatched by ranging predators.
They fare better near the captive lion’s den
where fat streaks in the hollow of a bone
licked quite as bare as the image on the chalk
that skeined by lamps will be attracting now
the moth swarms relished by the pipestrelle
in circuits drawn within my habitat.
I’m stuck on red in a ghost safari park
attended only by these lion shapes
jumbling through my native consciousness:
here, say, Old Billy snarls for MGM
and epic Samson shakes his honeyed mane;
heraldic lions flaunt their polished crowns
on coins that slide across the public bars
in White or Red or Golden Lion Inns
where come final call the Richard-hearted lions
get crudely thrown to chalk-faced Christians
that would not pull a thorn from Androcles
astride the billboards of an English night
in which my wildest thoughts thrust everywhere,
bring down the temple on whose living world?
At last lights change to green, I drive away
charged highly in my metal carapace.
The lions electric, chalky, captive, free
Jostle beside me as my engine roars.