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

   There is a well-known nineteenth century American painting of a hard-bitten old frontier couple who stare with a potent mixture of defiance and resignation at the viewer.  They stand in front of their homestead, pitchfork in hand.  I met them yesterday on the train.  They sat opposite me, two large holdalls on the table between us; pitchfork, I supposed, on the luggage rack. They stared straight ahead, only their faces showing above the bags,  she by the window, he by the passage.  Silent, immobile, unseeing, for perhaps an hour.

   The train pulled into Leicester and he turned his head to look past his wife, out of the window.

   ‘Seems to be brightening up’,  he said.  She did not follow his gaze but turned to face him, looked him in the eyes and said:

   ‘So what?’  Hard, with a lift to one side of the mouth, then she stared precisely ahead once more, as did he.

   I was awed.  This may have been sustained for forty or fifty years.  He had not flinched to suggest surprise at the blow.  Here we have true commitment to a way of being, wrath nursed to keep it warm.

   But I am made of weaker stuff. After just an hour in their company - no, their presence - I itched to lighten the burden, to reach through the picture surface and touch this couple.

   I continued to perform the pantomime of working on the letter on my clipboard.  I pursed my lips looked up at the ceiling or out of the windows, scribbled a few words with energy, bit my biro, scribbled some more, fiercely scratched out failed sentences with disappointed shakes of the head.  But all the time I was writing on the canvas of the holdall nearest to me, large capital letters rubbed into the weave, black on blue.

   When I got out at Wellingborough I deliberately walked forward to an exit so that I would walk past them once more as I headed for the footbridge. They were still staring straight ahead, unblinking, bound for London and, to me, oblivion.

   But they carried my message, to raise a doubt, to show that someone had shared their journey, that a train carries many moods and many ways of being.  Nothing profound, just ‘Hi folks!’ with a big, jolly, jaunty exclamation mark.  One man’s vandalism is another man’s therapy.