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

It’s seventy years since the last chunks of sandstone
were hauled down to the shore and set in concrete,
lozenges of stone with rose or ochre strata
fixed into a sea wall that slopes up from the beach
towards a field where horses graze and lapwings nest,
and medieval drains are pushing through eroded earth.

Of the abbey, what remains are bumpy outlines
– cloisters, nave, infirmary – and the squat, rounded
chapterhouse, its shape echoed by, dwarfed by,
the power station just up the coast, whose indestructible
waste is in the seabed where layers of sediment
became the quarried sandstone, heaved over salt marsh

to be turned into an abbey: a busy little world that lasts
four hundred years, till dissolution cracks it apart,
and the walls, like skin around the soul, fall away,
tumbled into the mossfield, from where the broken,
consecrated stone is laden into boats, rowed across
the estuary, made into houses on a village street

and the bell that used to measure out the days is looted,
melted down, its metal sold for cannonshot.
Monks have no descendants, but the ghosts of those
who died here of the plague are said to wander
in a nearby garden; and if one of these spirits were to visit
this windswept shoreline again, perhaps he’d find it

much as it once was, lapwings feeding in the grass
dotted pink and yellow with cranesbill and tormentil.
Take him on into another century, and maybe what he’ll see
is the shell of the power station, decommissioned,
and the sea wall helpless, unable to prevent waves
swamping wildflowers, or creeping under the door

of the chapterhouse, covering with saltwater
its old carved gravestones. Here, in this moment
of history, the memory of a bell is chiming in his head
and he has a sense, like something pulled up from a dream,
that once, behind him in that field, there was a building
whose walls were lit pink-gold on evenings like this.