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

An anonymous shadow against the glittering High Road -
but for his skullcap, brilliant on time-frosted hair -
he turned to ask where we were bound, and we answered him:
‘Arts Club, Chelsea. You know it?’ He drove along King Street bright with shop windows and lamplight, glossy with rain.
‘Have you the knowledge?’ I wondered aloud, and meaning
the intricate map all cabbies have packed in their brain cells.
‘Knowledge enough’, he answered in soft Caribbean;
‘Too much; I have tasted the fruit of the bitter tree’.
Stopped at a traffic light, waiting, I questioned again.
‘Have you been living here long?’ ‘Too long, too long’.
‘Do you like driving?’ - ‘I no longer love the car-culture.
London’s no place for my children. Where I grew up
there were beaches and boats, and our gardens. School wasn’t bad. But here my son got into trouble. He said he felt stifled
with no room to play; and not enough of my time.
The games that he learned in the street broke the rules, and our hearts’.
The lights changed to green, we moved on, but the shadow continued:
‘I had my own business, a saleroom of shiny new cars.
Mercs on the forecourt, and Daimlers. I thought I had made it,
and borrowed to buy a real home, and went back to square one.
I have lost everything. Everything. So I drive taxi.
You see, I have learned my lesson: I drive and pray’.

‘I think this is it’. ‘The Arts Club?’ He stopped. We paid him.
The cab with its driver wearing a colourful skullcap
glided away to rejoin the ruby necklace
of tail-lights that vanished around the curve of the road
as we went into the noisy, forgettable party.