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

    The other elders do not share my misgivings about the culling. It is, they argue, properly organised, and selective. I know from experience - we elders are all survivors, are we not? - that only the brightest, strongest, and most inventive ever escape the beaters, the dogs, and the official killers.  Such youths are exactly the type that any rationally run society needs.  Those that die would, most of them, have been socially inadequate or disruptive.  As a whole body, we do need to spare selected youths, in order to regenerate our population. Only the surplus has to be got rid of.  The neatness of this argument has always worried me.  True, the young are not taken by surprise. The culling takes place the same week every year.  Exactly seven days from now.  At their age, I was a lucky one.  I fear for my son, who might not be.
      
    Our laws forbid me outright to help him in any way.  All parents must observe total impartiality.  It is a lottery, and it cannot be fixed. It has to take its course.
      
    Other societies, for different reasons from ours, have always culled girls.  In selecting boys, we like to think we are more advanced. Controlling their numbers keeps the population down, and, in theory, it should make our country more peaceful, as there are fewer youths to compete with each other, to taunt, challenge, and launch attacks. For some time now, all the same, these bright, strong survivors have not always helped social harmony.  Some have indeed turned criminal. These have had to be hunted down for a second time, by the combined forces of the remaining young, the mature and the ageing.  With women, of all ages, filling the vital role of beaters.
      
    Our society does not make a fetish of fair play.  And so we have no use for the idea of giving our quarries an even chance.  The only concession we make, on the culling days, is that no weapon more modem than a club may be used.  Even the use of a club is a practical matter.  When guns used to be allowed, frequently hunters, in the darkness and the excitement of the chase, shot each other.  Such accidents are unlikely with clubs.  We all know too in our ageing bones that we must have a direct sensation of what we are doing in culling the young.  We have to feel the jolt all the way up our arms when the club staves the skull in,  and the blood spatters where it will. As a matter of principle, youths at bay are supposed not to resist their killers.  If they have failed to outrun or outfox their pursuers, they have no right of self-defence.  Biology, however, gainsays principle. Most fight like furies, with bare hands, booted feet, butting heads, and teeth snapping and tearing at any exposed flesh in range.
      
    Only full-blown illness or true decrepitude excuse any of the potential hunters from duty.  Until our dying day, if we can walk or drive, we are expected to take part.

      
    Seven days after the meeting where I expressed some misgivings, as I have done every year, even long before my own son was born, we begin to gather in our various communes across the nation.  At twilight.  The young annual contingent have fanned out at dawn from their homes, most to the hills or denser woods.  Some, reinventing the wheel each year, take to the sewers.  They are always the first to be found and dispatched.  And the first to be buried, without honours, but also without dishonour, for they have played their part.  We are not, as a collectivity, inhumane;  we are businesslike.  We are not a rich folk;  we can afford few luxuries.
      
    For our public signals on these occasions, we do not have, like some peoples,  church bells.  Nor sirens, for we do not know of any enemies from abroad to fear.  We light bonfires, on the five hills around us, at the same time.  And then the hunt begins.  In silence.  No whoops or other cries.  The hunters and the hunted hear only the swishing through undergrowth, the muted curses when ankles turn, the heavier and heavier breathing of all concerned.
      
    Shirkers are punishable.  I dread one year coming across an unresisting lad, who will simply stop and wait to be finished, will almost beg me to be quick.
      
    Here I am, a few yards behind a dozen men of varying ages, some of whom look back at me to check that I am not malingering, but simply slower of foot.  We carry, each of us, our club resting on one or the other shoulder.  The full moon is obscured by no clouds.  It was always, inevitably, this way, as far back as I think I can remember.
      
    The leaders have caught up with a breathless boy, who has run too fast too soon.  One of them - there is never any argument; self-selection runs smoothly - steps forward, raises the club as high above his head as it will go, and brings it down on the youth’s skull.  
    A crunching sound of bone giving way and at the same time a brief cry, almost of surprise.  The body slumps to the ground.  We are all expert in verifying death after lives of practice.  One stoops to make sure.  The boy is dead.  The corpse will be picked up by the cart and its aged team which follows each squad of hunters.  I busy myself with driving into the luckily soft soil near the body one of the stakes painted brilliant white, of which each group carries a stock, to mark the site for the collectors.
      
   I cannot afford to feel any compassion.  The whole is more important than the parts.
      
   We move on.  We must not return to base before dawnlight. Rules are rules.  Some of the young survivors from previous years do not, to judge by their behaviour, believe this.
      
    The dogs lope on ahead of us, sniffing and occasionally growling quietly to each other, or looking back at us.  It sometimes seems as though it is they who pull us onwards.  Yet they have the limited task of locating the runaways.  They do not need to be whistled off.  They stop and back away when they find the quarry.  We would not ask animals to do what we then do.
      
    The women beaters work with the dogs, in a well-understood division of labour.  Every part of the whole operation is equally crucial.  No human among the hunters can feel a second-class citizen, and the dogs walk proudly.
      
    Still trailing behind, I look up when passing under a large oak tree.  I catch a brief flash.  Moonlight on metal.  I stop.  I am looking at my son through the branches.   He never goes anywhere, even bed or bath, without that steel disc on a cord around his neck.  He has never let me see whether it is plain metal, or has a message etched into it. Perhaps from a girl.  Since he was ten or so years old, he has told me very little of his own accord, and I early on wearied of always badgering him with questions.  We have settled for mainly silence. Usually, it serves well enough.
      
    Tonight silence forces itself on us.  Given the nearness of the team, who have stopped for a breather twenty paces ahead, we cannot either of us make a sound.  As clouds start scudding across the night sky and the moon, now we see one another, now we don’t.  When I can glimpse it, his gaze is expressionless.  He knows there is no point in miming a plea.   Each of us speaks a mute’s language foreign to the other.  I do not even know what is going through my head, let alone his.
      
     Let alone his.  Will I, when the time comes?
      
    A sudden muttering, part grumbles, part encouragement, from amidst the group, sets us all off moving again.  I am relieved to walk in unison.
      
   Tonight I am taking a step beyond what I have said in assemblies.  Correction:  my steps are taking me beyond mere words. I am voting with my feet.  I know the penalty if I am found out.   There have been a small number of such cases, over the years.  You become, the next time round, a prey instead of a hunter. You are shunted back to youth, the dream of many ageing men turning to a nightmare.
      
    Nobody seems to have noticed.  If anyone had, he or she would have immediately denounced me, surely?  If you are not for them, you are against them.
      
    Before dawn, when all ceases, we find seven more.  I finish off one, in case the others think me lacking in zeal.  I club him angrily, excessively, almost pleasurably.  Besides, once started. we have to finish.  Our society has not the resources to care for vegetables.
      
   (If I have not so far mentioned our son’s mother, my wife, it is because, about three years before his imminent future truly came home to her, and seeing that my brief protests in meetings had changed nothing nor were ever likely to change anything, she stopped talking to me.  Since then, we share the same space during the day and the evening, that is all.  Because of her choice of abstention, she has lost most civic rights, and only her age - she is ten years older than me - has spared her more drastic sanctions).
      
   We find on our return at dawn that, while the rest of us, the more or less hale and consenting majority, have been out, some invalid youths, excused duty temporarily, have committed acts of sabotage on public buildings. Apparently some girls and women, similarly excused, did not try either to prevent them, or, later, to identify them. Those of my generation are beginning to fail to understand what is happening.
      
    Tonight is set aside for celebration: another successful harvest.
      
    The sky is livid, as if profoundly bruised after a violent collision. All present know there is not much food.  Such as there is has been placed very visibly on a mound near the beach, though no one has so far thought to guard it.  We try to enjoy ourselves under the sickly moon.  Some few have not bad voices, and some others even produce small instruments to blow and suck or pluck.  The mood refuses to come right.  The sand, after the tide has gone out, looks firm enough for dancing on.  But, closer to, there is a thin skin of some glutinous substance above trapped water, and the whole surface does not feel stable. Quite apart from all this, who has the spark to kindle enjoyment, or the will to share it?  I cannot speak for the others.  My wife, when we chance to meet in the crowd, does not only, as usual, keep silent, but also turns her gaze aside.  Either, as happens, our son survived and has taken to the wilds, or another returning group stumbled on him.  Either way, we have, separately, lost our child.