You Can Stop Shouting Now

This semester in college includes three literature courses, which means a hefty amount of reading! Fortunately, some of that reading is poetry. Here's one poem introduced to me today in British Literature. Click here for a reading of the poem from the poet himself.

The Shout
Simon Armitage

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park—I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm—
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

Simon Armitage is a popular poet of England, still currently writing. "The Shout" was published in a book by the same title in 2005. I like to find poets, new to me, who have a solid career in the past and more to come in the future. I think Mr. Armitage and I could become good friends. I am eager to read more of his work.

Feel free to visit the Simon Armitage Web Site to peruse his impressive work, which expands well beyond the world of poetry.