The poet laureate Simon Armitage has written a poem about the war in Ukraine. Titled ‘Resistance’, Armitage read it on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday 11 March. The poem includes these lines: “The next scene smacks / of archive newsreel: platforms and trains / (never again, never again).”

It concludes: “False news is news / with the pity / edited out. It’s war again: / air-raid sirens can’t fully mute / the cathedral bells – / let’s call that hope.”

Armitage told the Guardian: The poem was a “refracted version of what is coming at us in obscene images through the news”. Reports from Ukraine were both compelling and difficult to watch, he said.

The poem repeats the words “it’s war again” several times, in reference to successive conflicts in recent history. “There’s a weariness in the poem; here we go again,” said Armitage. “But [the poem] is also a form of resistance, I hope. There’s not a lot I can do, sitting here. But writing it down, taking ownership of the terrible images, feels a positive act.”

While evoking the desperate urgency of escaping death and destruction, Armitage’s poem ends on a note of hope: “An air-raid siren can’t fully mute the cathedral bells.”

He added: “I was talking to somebody the other day who’d been a young man at the height of the cold war and the Bay of Pigs crisis, and he said he used to go to bed not knowing whether he’d wake up in the morning.

“I don’t think we’re quite there yet. But in terms of catastrophe, tragedy, this feels as real and raw as anything I can remember. And the stakes are very high.”

You can read the whole poem here