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

Surely it’s time to forget? To put the genie
back into the bottle and cork it?
For the Irish and Scots to stop re-enacting
400-year-old history and to declare
No Contest over the Battle of the Boyne?

Personally, I have nothing against Guy Fawkes
and his sad gaggle of co-conspirators: Catesby,
Keyes, Winter, Rookwood, both the Percys,
Digby, Grant, Bates, Tresham, both the Wrights,
(and two Wrights don’t necessarily make a wrong) -

that pathetic bunch of no-hopers. Losers. Imagine!
Hiring a cellar beneath the House of Lords!
then, secretly (!) stashing away their 36 barrels of TNT,
their stack of faggots and cartload of firelighters,
their six months’ supply of the Catholic Herald. Imagine!
The Centre for Explosion Studies, University of Wales
at Aberystwyth has usefully computed that that little lot,
if detonated, would have demolished Westminster Palace,
Big Ben, the Odeon Leicester Square and Wembley Stadium,
although the Turner Prize for 1605 would not have been affected.

It was all such a long time ago.
Today’s pyrolaters may well have forgotten the misty origins,
the dismal details - that is, if they ever knew.
They are accustomed, every evening, on the TV news,
to bigger and better bangs from hi-tech terrorist atrocities.

Personally, I have nothing against Guy Fawkes,
or Catholics in general. Indeed, some of my best friends ....
Surely there are more appropriate modern monsters to stick on top
of our bonfires? If we must have bonfires,
let’s have them on May 1st. Let’s celebrate the Beltane spring.