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

He steps off the soundless train at the deserted station and with his bag in his hand crosses the church park and makes his way through the darkened streets of the town where he spent his childhood, there’s no doubt that’s where he is. The chemist’s with its gilt lion is still there where it was when he was small. And there’s the zinc-grey school looming up, whose floors, stairways and hand-rails he too once helped to wear down. But not a single person to be seen! Driven by an irresistible longing he goes further, past the town house and the desolate wide square, till he is standing before the house which had all the time been his goal. He presses th doorbell, listens with tensed nerves and held breath and hears a faint signal ringing within the dark house, behind the gothic pointed windows with their drawn blinds. But no one answers, though it feels as if his life depended on someone opening the door. Having waited for an agonisingly long time he is ready to turn back with heavy steps when a window in the neighbouring house suddenly opens and a woman thrusts her head out of the bright rectangle. “Who are you looking for?” she screams. “I’m looking for the old gentleman who’s supposed to live here,” he says. “At least he did stay here, in my childhood. I could confide in him. At one time he was likea father to me. I would like to talk to him again, perhaps throw myself in his arms.” “The old fellow’s dead long ago!” the woman yells. And like someone emptying a bucket of slops she pours a volley of guffaws over the man at the door, that pathetic idiot. There’s nothing left for him but to pick up his brown bag again, return to the still deserted station and wait for the train which,as soundlessly as it arrived a little while ago, will carry him far away from here.

(1956)