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

The factory builds itself before your eyes
as though some Futurist dreamed
of simple cylinders and monumental blocks.
Conveyor belts traffic overhead,
there's the crunch of chippings underfoot
and everything's grey with cement dust.

Steam pours from silos, tanks and vents
and spare parts are strewn around
like giant meccano or the bits of a clock;
a gear, a spring, an escapement, rods
as thick as an oak tree so you can see
how it all fastened together, the nuts
and bolts of a Newtonian universe
building reality out of time and motion.

A twig pokes at you
as if there's something you ought to remember.
Celandines among the birches are a hint,
the beginnings of an idea or something alien
and ivy could be pointing the way
to the great quarries where a thousand
feet of limestone are laid wide open,
whole epochs of geological time
blasted into boulders and carted away.

A JCB grinds its gears out of sight,
dumps a load of thunder that breaks
into smaller and smaller pieces
till a final pebble rocks to a stop -
the magic of gravity, one chunk falling
on another, a whole life mounting up
one stone at a time, one person
or a single thought standing out
and barely chance to focus on it
before it's come to a standstill.

The place is deserted, plenty
going on but no-one doing it.
A workforce of six hundred men
and you never get to see them?
As though some narcotic spell
keeps everything in a stupor of morphia,
lithium and the heavy metals of sleep.

It's the sort of elemental set
that good and bad would get
to fight it out in, cause and effect
in an old film or a simple system
so you assume a control room:
a clean area where artificial light
pools on a polished floor and ranks
of buttons keep it all going
with occasional adjustments
to the balance and counterbalance.

Overhead, the chimney's a white
colossus against the mighty blue sky.
Someone in the village said,
when he was coming in to land
the smoke was what he looked for first
and when he saw that, he was home.

On a calm day it's a prayer
heading straight up through the stratosphere
and out, more or less on a direct line
to heaven, that much of it and so shining
white on a sunny day you'd swear
it was pure enough to get there.

On the ground, 50,000 volts keep the dust
emissions down, earth into the valley.
Two rotary kilns are 70 metres long and wide
as a house tumbling round 24 hours
a day at I.7 revs a minute. Or is it...
the movement of the earth you can hear?
The great axles fixed and the hills rotating?
                                         Also the sky.

A thrush sings it's heart out
and a clear thought drops into place:
this is the engine that cranks the earth
through space, steers it past night and day,
also gears the orbits, the almighty spirals
and powers up the stars.

Seasons of villages and cities are decided here.
From here the equinoxes are fixed,
the millennia carried out, even the nature
of immense darkness is anchored
to this valley, where the axle turns.

Now the earth is swung towards the sun.
Underground, rabbits feel the pulse
and quiver softly, crouch close as they can
to the workings of the exquisite heart.

*

By night, brilliant sodium light.
Steam transmuted to gold dust.
Everything lit up as if the Starship Enterprise
were docked here. Shield your eyes
and if you feel compelled to speak at all,
use a hushed voice, like in a cave, or cathedral.

A freight train rattles through the wood.
Badgers forage by the track
and up on the hill, lambs shimmer
with a phosphorescent sheep dip
that scares off foxes.

And now the moon's up.
You can't drag your eyes away.
What's fluid in you, leans.
The water table lifts beneath your feet
and rock waves of anticline and syncline
strain in different directions along
the crazy highroads of strata and seam.

In this weird light, the cavernous door
of the new coal store has the pull
of a local black hole and for all you know,
leads straight down to the deepest pit of all.
Going too close means never to escape,
or perhaps mistaking a far off truck's
reversing bleat for the falling note
of someone else, whose courage gave way
when their time came and didn't want to go.

Your own last whimper will fade
to the final sound of all the languages ever.
Noises issuing from the mouths of water and rock
and even the stopped mouths of the dead
and the extinct will catch up with you.

You too will join the swollen statements
of underground streams pouring
into the ocean, the teeming ocean
that whispers itself into the troubled dreams
of the living, who may or may not hear,
who are busy weeping their own tears
into a sea where it all still matters
and into which, from time to time,
only the bell drops its reminders.

Further down still and nothing to do with men,
molten iron pitches, tumbles and churns
in the furnace that rolls the planet round.

Now you've been here, go home.
Don't come back till you have to.
Leave by the back way, find the way back
to a world where simple rules hold true,
where lessons can be learned
and time's a thing to run out of.

Take a stone from the track to remind you
of rocks, boulders, gravel, dust - the necessary
business of grinding into manageable pieces
what is fundamental and astonishing.