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

I. The One

And beef I eat and beef
Around me grow the deaths
While I eat beef, they grow glassy
Darkly reflect the One who eats the beef.

I plunge into the beef before me with my fork
There’s a rejoicing in beef when the prongs go in
Into the inside. From far off I hear myself laughing
And smack my lips, smacking my lips, and kiss, kissing, and still rejoice
Here in the inside
The prongs tear
Silence apart.

And beef I eat and beef
Around me grow the deaths
While I eat beef, they grow glassy
Darkly reflect the One who eats the beef.

The one beef was a Jew basher
In Rottingen and in Wurzburg and in Nuremberg
We’d just begun to forget the oioioi
Among the Teutonic Knights and we placed their caskets in the hallway
Where it was mouldy enough for fear to expire
The knights’ bones were at peace there, soon as they bleached
At Passover the dead Christchild was under the table again
The one beef was a Jew basher

And beef I eat and beef
Around me grow the deaths
While I eat beef, they grow glassy
Darkly they reflect the One who gauges the beef

I like beef between my teeth. Anyway
The valuable pauses ooze out between breaths
The delights have floated up from the depth of being
And stretched the surfaces, so the last modest waterboatmen
Can skim the surface well, though all round very dried out stuff. The
Secrets glassily reflect their own disappearance in
The backs of shapes hastening off. So this life grows all around.
And I eat beef and can’t do otherwise

And beef I eat and beef
Around me grow the deaths
While I eat beef, they grow glassy
Darkly reflect the One who eats the beef.

II. The Other

The other beef was a doctor
In Birkenau or in Buchenwald or in Lublin land
We’d just begun to forget the shadows of the Jew’s Beech
Among the oaks, put the writ in the hallway
And beef I eat and beef
Our noses were equal with other noses
In our father’s house, so dearly beloved, firm were
Our legs under the table in the baptised living room
As in the unbaptised, but just before Easter
Around me grow the deaths

Just before Pesah we heard people in our hallway.
They came into the room and peered under the table
Where our legs were they took the legs
Set nose against nose in the hallway
While I eat beef, they grow glassy

In the hallway, where it’s mouldy enough
So our courage expires ajaj . . . the bones of the knights
Disappear in the beards, the writ flees under the bark of the beeches
The other beef was a doctor in Buchenwald and in Majdanek
Darkly reflect the One who gauges the beef.

III. Nocturno

So I’ve eaten beef again
Drive the prongs of my furk in the silence
Tear apart the fibres, scatter watercress over it
I cut the beef into very thin slices

I like beef when it passes the gullet
No pork can do it so intensively, no chicken
My lips smack, there is a rejoicing in my gorge, my gut
Dances, is blessed. The deaths grow all around

The one beef’s a doctor good
The other beef a Jew-basher stout
And when the sap’s up in the beechenwood
Their knives come out.