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

Professors going to dig their tea
are overlooked in their library of earth
by the Cathedral towers. To me
the whole May scene is held for ever
in a special sort of Saturday afternoon weather.
                                                         David Scott

My father's allotment was on Mount Joy,
the last place where the monks rested when
they carried St Cuthbert's body, and before
they met the old woman with her dun cow
and christened their place Dunholme.

He was a Bede man and had loved the city
from his youth, in age he rested on its piety,
antiquity and peace. He grew the flowers he loved,
roses for my mother, and all manner of exotica –
vegetables whose names we scarcely knew.

He grew yellow tomatoes, the first I'd ever seen,
sold Christmas trees for church funds and
replanted them each year when people
needed to get rid of them. Younger men
did his heavy digging and he their watering.

We lived in Mount Joy Crescent, sheltered
by the holy hill and with a view of the cathedral
from the bathroom window – we took our visitors
to admire it and the hardier among them climbed
to my attic to see it through the skylight.

We were happy there, scoffed at our friends
who worried that we lived in number 13,
refused to believe that superstition could have
caused my mother's death when she fell
down the cellar stairs and our lives fell apart.

Those allotments live on in my heart, though
they were obliterated years ago and the new
science block stands where they once were;
a special sort of summer weather is always there
and I am happy that professors still dig.