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

Take me with you through your time
and show me the horrors you knew.
You say there are things I must see.
You are the father of my mind
and I still feel the hand on my shoulder
still see your face from a child’s upward look.

There are skeleton trees
and smoke, and stones thrown high in chaotic waves.
We stand on the rubble heap of a village
and see the whole battle area.
The land is sick and barren.
it groans with unremitting pain.
Armies spread across the landscape
with their machines
and contrivances of steel and barb
busying themselves in death and pain.
The land is infested with termite men
burrowing like maggots in the carcass of a dying world.

The sound of their vile play is everywhere.
It carries to the furthest feeling
and echoes to the vacuum of snuffed-out life.
You turn my eyes to see wounded men cowering in shell holes.
They are insects, dirtied and writhing,
in a hole trodden by men’s non-thinking.
You make me look at them,
children of a brain-damaged world, crying inadequate tears.
Can we leave now, grandfather?
Can we quit this place?

We leave the wasteland together
and walk silently over pits of broken youth.
Tread softly, you say,
and do not press dirt into clear eyes
which still peer at the sky.
Do not disturb the earth,
for they lie shallow in hurried graves,
dressed by their elders in the garb of war.
Accoutrements of leather and steel
sink with their bones
as they settle to their endless sleep,
nourishing the earth with their unlived years.

You look in sadness and anger
at the bloodied hair and torn uniforms
revealing cold, stilled youth.
See through my clear eyes to an innocent time
and let us be away from here.
Quickly now,
away from the approval-talk of old men
with rites of death over the young.
We hurry away,
yet still we hear the bugle calls
which prise young men from reason.

Sink to the ground,
press your stomach to your knees.
Stifle the desperation in the wounded heart.
And that unsated drop,
that last uncried tear
held in the tightest eye,
leave that for God to know,
for Man never will...