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

There's a ship that carries my sweetheart away
There are six sausage-balloons the night tells of these maggots
           giving birth to the stars
There's an enemy sub that seeks out my sweetheart
There's a thousand shell-shattered fir trees surrounding me
There's a squaddie stumbling blindly through choking gas
There's us lot cut to ribbons in the rotgut trenches of Neitszche
           Goethe and Cologne
There's a place where I loiter whilst waiting for lost letters
There's lots of photos of my sweetheart in my wallet
There's prisoners exchanging panicky looks
There's a gun battery crew shaking themselves to bits
There's a post-orderly trotting in via the Lone Tree Road
There's a spy we heard of who passes us invisible as the blue
           horizon he blends shamelessly in with
There's my sweetheart's bust tall as a lily
There's a captain anxiously awaiting the latest TSF communiqué
           concerning the Atlantic
There are soldiers at midnight sawing planks for coffins
There are women carrying before them a bleeding Christ of Mexico
           and raucously demanding corn
There's the Gulf Stream warm and good for our health
There's an open cemetery of crosses just 5 kilometres away
There's crosses scattered about from here to there
There's Berber figs on Algerian cacti
There are the long supple hands of my sweetheart
There's an inkpot I keep in a 15cm shell-case that no-one shot off
There's my commode-saddle exposed to the rain
There are rivers that won't run uphill again
There's a sweetheart who trains me tenderly
There was this Boche prisoner carrying his machine-gun over his shoulder
There are men in this world who've never seen war
There are Hindus gawping astonished at these Western lands
Thinking sadly of the folk they'll never see again
For in this war we've pushed the arts of invisibility a great deal further on