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

I and the friend silent beside me
Listening (we had picked our way
In semi-darkness through the copse)
Stood sheathed in twilight, with Brown Gelly
Outlined sleeping on the other side.

Then twice, the fox’s shrill cry
Stabbed the valley. He had heard it
All his life, who later talked of badgers,
Of the hare, his master’s sheep;
Who had been born five miles away,
In Bolventor near Dozmary.

‘Went inland once,’ he said.
Now seventeen. ‘I couldn’t stay there,
Felt shut in by trees. On the moor
There aren’t many trees. I like it that way.
I like wind coming off the hillside
Smooth and clean.’

                    There was no wind
Tonight. Only the cry sometimes
Of the fox, and the stillness of the hill,
And the sheep quiet under stone walls.

‘You wouldn’t like it then where I come from.
Parks and trees, of course, paint greens and grass.
It’s not like this.’ (Days break their suns
Against high walls where black dust veers.
No place there for badgers or the fox
That stabbed again, three times, stiletto-sharp —
Deft murder cloaked by darkness —
At the valley floor beyond the stream.)

As we moved away to where the farm
Lay bulked and vague against the hill,
Back through the copse, along the path,
I watched him. Quick and alert,
He belonged to this treeless moor
That curved through the slow dark rise
To Sibleyback beyond the farm.

I couldn’t think of the city for him
Except as a cage to beat against.
There he’d bruise and close up, hurt;
Go running to earth like a shot fox.