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

Only the big boys would go to the end of The Devil’s Cave, which was a bull’s-eye in one of the quarries on Kilvey Hill. Rust-coloured water streamed from out of the Cave and made its way to the pond that slept just beyond it. The water was as still as clingfilm tightened over a glass bowl. Growths of coarse grass had made a claim on the pond. It was a place where dragonflies would dart about like micro helicopters. Pond insects, some as immobile as plastic insects, blemished the water’s skin. It was a place where the dotted spawn clustered like see-through jelly. It was a place where the agitated tadpoles became sulking frogs. Was there really a fish called Pike lurking in the depths of the pond? Would it really bite through a boy’s probing hand?

     The entrance to the Cave smelt of old iron and bad water. As tall as a man, the entrance only offered a scary darkness. I knew the stories about big boys going right into the core of Kilvey Hill. I could only begin to imagine the shoulder-touching darkness of Hell itself. Why was it called The Devil’s Cave? Was the Devil waiting at the very end: the end that not even the big boys could reach?

     I stepped inside, barely a few yards, the dampness chilled my tightening thoughts. I faced a tunnel of blackness pushing blackness into the blackness of the hill. The blackness raided my imagination; it draped my soul with the winged, black cloak of evil. I smelt the breath of Lucifer. I turned and frantically stepped back out into the falling morning’s light. For a while, a sense of the Cave’s blackness was still in my mind.