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

After taking our son to the station
we decide not to go straight home
but drive for a while, letting his calm presence
become the fields of evening,
his silent kindness linger in light
that casts long shadows on a road
we marched down years ago
when younger than he is now:
anxious students clutching our banner,
who feared for the window-poles
borrowed without permission, we
were marching against the war in Vietnam.
It was to have been a silent march,
but a small bunch of self-styled Maoists
kept up a chant of Dien Bien Phu!
As we crossed the bridge, the Eden
shrugged off our voices, shrinking them,
tossing them back at us diminished.
Impatient with the revolutionaries
I was a naïve girl wanting only to listen
to a curlew’s melancholy calling, the voices
of oyster-catchers in the estuary;
my thoughts all over the place, like lapwings.
They were a common sight in the fields
back then, and buzzards were rare.
This comes home to me as a buzzard
silently lifts from a gatepost as we pass
and merges with the screaming fighter
rising from the base and Iraq-bound.
The birds are different but the wars
are the same, only changing their names,
and we are still marching, ashamed
of what is still being done in our name.
It was November then, and dark
when we shuffled into Cupar, the shops
all shut and no one around to take our leaflets.
At times it seems as though this is the most
we ever achieve: to march into darkness,
into silence, our words unheard
or blown about like litter. But sometimes
it is our children who redeem us,
bequeathing their benevolent strength.
Hoisting tattered banners
we stumble onward with gifts all undeserved -
these fields of evening light
whose merciful shadows we may call our own.