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

We came to the ancient city of Herat
- our forebears Alexander, Genghis Khan
and Tamburlaine, with all their armies.
We arrived with youth, naiveté, and cameras.

We had crossed the border from Iran
in a rackety bus, had gawped at lunar landscapes,
watched our first (and only) camel caravan
move, impassive, slow, across the desert spaces.

From the conflict and confusion that was Teheran,
lured by eastern promises
we came to the ancient city of Herat.
There we inhaled our fill of Afghan Gold.

We were silent at the mausoleum of a queen,
and at the tomb of Jami with its naked grave
out of which grew a pistachio tree.
We took our ease in whitewashed courtyards,

stood bare-headed in Herati sun,
half-reverent at shrines with pigeons.
In the ancient city of Herat
we found much to delight, to entertain us.

We lingered in the cool of the Friday Mosque,
stared wondering at elaborate calligraphy,
were guided by the mullah’s smiling son
who asked us to play Frisbee in the park.

The rug-weavers and the metal-workers
seemed settled in their medieval ways.
We never dreamed that evil days would come again
to the ancient city of Herat.

We talked with brothers in the tea-shop.
The sisters meanwhile had lifted up their burkas,
danced to Pink Floyd in dark interiors.
I was lost down shady tree-lined streets.

Yet it was only weeks before the Russians came,
then twenty years before the Taleban
and Al-Qaeda brought - America and bombs
to the ancient city of Herat.

It’s difficult to say what’s left of me
and those I stayed with at the Parc Hotel
as we were then, and as the city was
if not the shell-shocked remnants of ourselves.

I knew the bright glare of Herati sun,
the muezzin’s call, the minarets,
but so much has come between us since
now I’m voyeur of those war-ravaged streets,

and broken lives, and broken promises,
grey-haired, and battling with grey skies,
and never to be refreshed by English rain.
We have no youth, and no naiveté to bring

but other new-styled innocents will come,
as we did then, in calmer days,
new would-be conquerors who’ll make their claims
upon the ancient city of Herat.