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

Brixton station. They put
bronze statues there -
a girl standing by the
platforms edge, you see her
pass as the train draws in.
There’s a seated group further down.
How many times do you think
they are real people? Nice to
Look at people, tidy, positive,
decent, it’s a pleasure that
they are there. Then the bronze
uniform colour and the stillness - but
real people are fairly still on platforms -
there’s a moment before and a moment
after you realise again what they are.
Between the moments is no space of time,
only a flash across two terminals,
an energy spark. A sense of being had,
betrayed, made fun of, mocked,
let down and cheated - all
and none of these - is overwhelmed
by a sense of how ingenious and what
an act of affirmation both of art
and of Brixton, they can put this here
and it not be vandalised year after year:
and Brixton welcomes art.
Railton Road, known as The Front Line
since the Brixton riots, literally a stone’s
throw away, parallel to the track
as far as Herne Hill Station.

Brixton I hear is getting gentrified.
It wasn’t when this statue was put up.
Probably the Lambeth council did it,
seen by many as barmy and later proven
to have been corrupt. Many
would have thought these statues proof,
a crazy waste of rates. I don’t know
what the sculptor was paid, what else
the money might have gone on. Still,
in default of a Medici or Ezra Pound’s
hero Malatesta, now that temples
and piazzas have faded and stations
are among the last of our shared spaces,
I salute the collective energy
of Brixton people, the council it had,
with all its faults and virtues,
the sculptor’s vision, the models,
the labourers who did
the installation, the travellers passing it.