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

           After you said ‘I
really dislike the way terror has come to
mean terrorism’ I return here. To look at
           Caravaggio’s three biggest canvases in
           the smallest place in the world. It seems a good place
                      to start: ‘for beauty is nothing

           but the beginning of terror’.
‘Is he terrified?’ One leg poised shakily on the stool
over a step, he turns to look at what the quill-pen cannot
           capture in time. Eye to eye, old man and young boy
           catch sight of their counterparts. ‘Suddenness is terrifying because
                      something is synchronised?’

           Suddenly the spotlight’s gone.
The viewing’s over. The green light on the metre
flashes for more coins. ‘Who will be the next to give?’
           Clink. The light’s back again and all the fingers are
           pointing at him, his head buried in tax-figures, doing his duty for
                      the Empire in Capernaum.

           ‘Is there something terrifying
about this scene?’ Repetitious hymns on CDs,
the unlikely convergence of French, Chinese,
           American and Japanese fighting for position before
           the light goes off, hungrily capturing digital images, until, clink,
                      the light’s suddenly gone.

           ‘Who will be the next to pay?’
‘It’s like Saddam Hussein’s hiding place.’ ‘Yes it’s dark
here, but who knows what’s hidden?’ It is one of those
           analogies established in half dark rooms - ‘the axis
           of evil’, ‘the arc of extremism’, ‘the alliance of moderation’ - which
                      when exposed to the flashlights

           petrify, now fact. Clink. Now
the executioner emerges, seizing St Matthew’s
wrist, dragging him up from the floor, so that the sword
           can drop into the right place. ‘What is fact? What is
           apparition?’ The priest standing next to me stares suspiciously at what
                      I have been writing.

           Clink. And in an instant
I remember what you have written, ‘I share
with you the sense of doom about our species
           and in particular our generation. But objectively I
           can see that we are not the first to feel this way, and so probably
                      won’t be the last.’

           Clink. Another coin.
‘How can I reply?’ I linger on the word ‘probably’
and hate my scepticism about posterity. ‘Che è questo?’
           ‘Ev-ge-nie Ma-rie Cha-ro-lu-tte...’, the elder one’s
           reading French in Italian, a mother tongue he’s not yet mastered.
                      ‘Dé-cé-dée a Ro-me...’

           Two of them are lying
on their stomachs reading the stone out loud,
retracing each chiselled valley letter by letter
           contented in their own new game. ‘Che è dé-cé-dée?’
           the sister asks. ‘Non so. Decidi?’ Clink. The banal sound of an
                      interval between on and off,

           one step forward and one step
back. ‘Le X-I De-cem-bre...,’ now they synchronize,
‘M-D-C-C-C...’ Sshh! They look terrified as the priest loses
           patience. ‘The disgraceful and distressing and disturbing
           things humanity did and endured.’ I sit back and return again and again
                      to the meaning of the sentence.

           ‘For beauty is / nothing but / the beginning /
of terror, which / we are still just / able to endure...’ It’s good
to remember this much, however little. Clink. The angel’s
           palm-leaf is about to touch the dying man. The boy and his
           sister sit speechless on the foreign tomb. ‘And we are / so awed
                                                                                      because / it
                      serenely disdains to / annihilate / us?’