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

My cousin's friend's mother draws me to one side
slips me a whisper of her uncle, learning to scull
on the River Lee. Its colours shine. The silver blue
of the winter river, the slicked parting of his blond cropped hair.
His dreams of Oxford, columns and spires - creamy white
among the trees - fading away in the smoke of the war.

A new friend climbs into my car, spreads out on her lap
stories of African students near Blackhorse Road. As she talks
what is vague takes shape, symbols appear - a street, a name.
Patterns become narrative. She reads the marks left by those
who slipped beneath the surface of London, found digs with
un-numbered doors, sent money home.

Another pushes a scrap between the glasses on our table.
Together we stitch in the detail. Her grandmother, at eighteen,
foundation garments and face powder. Walthamstow -
threadbare, thick with soot, heaving with life. His bus, thin-tyred,
choking through the streets. Their leaving - to build their family
among trees and shining windows - never to speak of home.

My mother - on a visit - reaches into a place I never knew,
drags out a memory of Plaistow, thirty years before.
As we walk and talk she shakes the dust away, and clear
as the day she packed it away is Cumberland Road -
the pub, the Pipe Factory, the Kier Hardie Hut, the neighbours
complaining of rock and roll through summer windows.

I have kept them all. Evenings, I smooth the pile
with the flat of my hand, lift corners to count colours,
thumb my way down folded rungs. Soon I shall begin -
unpicking seams, trimming, pinning, stitching.
Be clothed in the cold city.