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

(Tyseley is in Birmingham, south of the centre. It is home to the city’s Railway Museum)

Umber-green damp
sprawls in rumps and elbows
on Tyseley’s middle platform
like tumbled pre-war vagrants
long soaked into the tarmacadam
with the secret of who did them in.

The platform rains on itself,
sucking down cloud
meant for Whitlock's End and Berkswell.
Wetted grass waves its old-dog’s hair
to be back-slicked by multiple bellies of freight
or an express haul of cams and paper
and vacant eyes down-country.

The seasons of Tyseley heave their bows
through the chop of night waters--
till one summer Friday,
when an evening sun bound for Stratford
fecklessly strays
and cries itself down the fanlit ravines
as the dust of gilded demolition--

and on the platform
rise broad-billowed parasols
in horizons of peacock silk
and cricket-stumps broach the tarmacadam,
stanching the mossed hearts of murdered men,
and saris laugh in the rumple of their folds
and ice clicks in perfumed juices.

A subcontinent
sings the song of twenty overs.
From the haze-crumbled roof of the Railway Museum,
the willowing hands of deities urge and applaud.
The sun forgets its pastel destination,
throwing light prodigiously down
so it sluices from bowler to long-stop,
draws vermilion bones at their twist and hunker,
tails each run-up like a meteor
that sears either nub of eternity.

Hours on, a driver lumps through,
straining for the shunt-yard and home;
sees gust-fingered bunting rise on the moss--
a question-mark, a cobra--
and a jug upended like all the world’s mirth
had its guts in a tickle; fogs his side-glass
with confusion, biffs it away. Then feels
the first kick of rain and eases back,
telling himself the place stands in its usual dun fathoms,
cursing that new coffee she put up.