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

As the gilt flaked away
from the mouldering symbols
in eczema patches of rust and chrome,
we saw inside, how rotten they were,
how putrefying, how fabricated
from piss and plaster gone so hard it

crumbled away, like ancient icing, mite-
-riddled cheese, old wedding-cake. How
they squatted and cluttered up
the tops of the walls, crowded us out,
into the background, carping for tribute,
multiplying, all in our godeaten bodies.

In the creaking church's hulk and the sanctum's hull,
groaning like an oaken keel
with boredom and with exertion,
they started to fall about us,
upon us, like gifts from heaven,
Christmas cloudburst, or the insides

of sonic huge carcass slaughtered
high up in the sky. We ducked,
covered our heads, our faces, for shame,
for pity's sake, in heaven's name
(for God's love started to run)
while certain members of the congregation

moved among us and coshed us
on the skull with crowbars to imitate the feel
of the falling symbols' impact.
Some of them wanted to stick our severed heads
up on poles around the vacant evacuated fresco-space
as substitutes for the fallen, evaporating symbols.

We poured out of the raped church
of clown-pouring symbols clutching
our breasts, our chests, our loved ones.
In the place of four statues three fell,
one remained, standing in the fire.
We clustered home, clasping pink and chrome

derelict bits of symbol and carefully
stuck them into albums to commemorate the dead
or began to elaborate new and brazen ones,
just the same as the old, out of the junk
in the dead-woman's room, never opened
till then. Charred hymnals and rotting leaves

littered the pews and the rain
fell steadily through the burnt out eaves
and pattered on wet paper and the altar
desecrated with candle-stubs, obscene slogans,
blackened tins and spoons, syringes, lumps of tar,
the carcasses of sacrificed cats, small rodents.

Everything was suspended at the moment
just before it collapsed, with a sigh
of old flour in sacks burst open,
cloud of stale make-up, clown's face paint, chalk
dust of bones. Storm-light came raining in
on the altar strewn with crushed-out match-heads
(with which we ground in witty little eyes
for the torn-out cigarette-paper-men).
Fire-eaten beams high against the louring sky.
Black birds perching