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

You buy Drina cigarettes from a kiosk
and chain-smoke the whole pack.
.
In the Turkish Quarter groups
of men in leather jackets stand
motionless and silent on street corners.
Old women squat on boxes all day,
failing to sell paper cups of pigeon food.
A tourist in combat gear is posing
for a photograph by the empty fountain;
her boyfriend looks faintly embarrassed.
The thought crosses your mind
that she deserves to be shot -
if only you had a Kalashnikov

You take a tram to the Holiday Inn;
this is where it all began, but
the journos have gone; now you
drink a beer surrounded by local mafiosi
and watch the waitress sashay from
table to table like a cat-walk model.
Later you stare at the blackened stump
of the Parliament Building.

On the road to Mostar there are
jars of honey at roadside stalls,
and oranges, but no buyers.
Steam rises from rooftops in the
warming sun and mingles with
wood-smoke from countless fires.
The photogenic light fails to disguise
a land of burnt-out villages
and shattered lives.
Mile-after-mile, the smudged
black eyes of gutted cottages
stare back at you.

Roadworks, a red light, single file traffic:
a woman of seventy-five or more
moves from car to truck to car,
but nothing’s offered, not even
by the UN guys in the 4x4.
A young Muslim with a child in her arms
plies the other end of the line.
This is the middle of nowhere;
you wonder where they’ve come
from and where they go at night.
.
In Mostar two girls stand
on the footbridge looking
down at the aquamarine
water of the Neretva,
and an old man snatches
a glance at their bums.
You walk down the front line
and take photographs on the sly
of wrecked apartments and
mansion houses against
a postcard-blue sky.
And you wonder why.

In the cemetery you count
the white gravestones and
remember from somewhere
that the plain ones are for women
and the ones with ‘hats’ are for men;
the difference doesn’t matter,
they all died in 1993.

And you’re at a loss for words
when the old Muslim in
white corduroys and kufi
asks you why your country
wants to go to war.

You realise you can’t explain any of this,
not to yourself nor to anyone else.
You take another pack of Drina
from your pocket and light a cigarette.