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

Some ceremony is involved
in hauling the bicycles up from the basement,
angling their awkwardness under
ductwork, around the stairwell landing,
and through the needle's eye of the side door,
as one wheel spins free, ticking.

The sun was singing down, loud and glorious,
as we wove our two thin tire lines through town
and to the bay, then through and around surprising
numbers of walkers, strollers, roller-bladers
of varying degrees of proficiency, and other
cyclists, all of us twisting and braiding
our various momentum together
like a fat rope played out by the water's edge.

The gravel swallowed our tires as we left the paveway
and headed toward the point, while volleyed
in and out of hearing on the wind we heard the beat
of some hydraulic jack driving posts into the earth,
or some jack's boom box, I said,

but came upon the backs of three white
t-shirts there instead, and the draped jet
hair and braids of two men and a woman
who sat facing the open blast
furnace of light on the water,
in the sky, drumming
the sun down,
and singing rhythmic undulations over
the chanted surface of the bay,

a song that went nowhere, musically,
and could have gone on forever – and the gravel
swallowed our tires again, as we quit
the landfill point to be home before dark,

and all I wanted to convey is the deep enjoyment
of our early summer evening ride, the unexpected
explosion of people at the new waterfront park
three generations after industry and E.coli
drove them all away, and the three first-peoples,
this late in the game, chanting and drumming
the sunset, an event
in which they were participant,
as we looked on.