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

They talked all that time about the winter
soon to be upon them, dust storms
spiralling miles high the pointing
furious fingers of Allah, ‘Afghanistan’
the word merely printed was mountains
defiles uncrossable, the chasms of ice
and not a tree, not one consoling tree...
              but one day the photo in the paper,
digitally configured fermenting dots
pointilliste though technical, was vague
pulsed in a rush across the world
and left unstable, for it seemed to me to show
Afghanistan in spring:
                       a troupe of reclusive clerics
gambolling in gauzy white on a lawn
leaves flickering, forsythia or some
friendly yellow flower and roses -
surely it was a rose bed - pink and breezy white;
‘a posse of frolicking vicars’
(I’d have joked were the times not sombre) -
off to drink green tea, tell stories, chat,
                              except the electronic pointilliste
had failed at the instant of their faces -
I couldn’t make out their faces -
just here and there the black hole
of a deeply foreboding eye.

Afghanistan in spring?
Maybe those fermenting dots
had been scrambled by a friendly virus
or the quantum jolt of a butterfly
flexing its last in my autumnal garden
that the wish might be father to the seeing
and I think I was not alone in longing
for some virtual reality to replace
the real one as the resolution of that picture
seemed to. I preferred it to be
springtime in Afghanistan
                   But other memories flicker
and configure the beauty of the place;
I’d give asylum in my mind
to the picture of a slender girl unveiled
in pink winding the camel trail along
a turquoise river;
                    to the rugs they used to sell -
embroidered arabesques of colour
faint warmth of saddles, animals, skin;
             the bakers, easy, cross-legged in white
slim hands slapping the flat bread;
                 the passionate clashing reds
of the refugees in rags;
                 even that sad-faced Jesus One
his tired ancient eyes, gestures insidious
holed up with his anathemas
in pure robes against a pitiless backdrop.
                        But brown dust swirls and melts
in grey waters. No-colour rises.

Safe somewhere in my mind’s caves
the icons of beauty go on pulsing
their neural constellations
recruited only by the longing
for them
                 even if the jittery picture of the mullahs
seeming to have a nice day
springtime in Afghanistan
has yellowed already as news
as newsprint does and was illusory anyway
             and once again in the ruins of the world
our teeming dusts rise and settle.