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

                        IV
                Dead March

Brought up to admire beauty and art
She had unfortunately never
Recovered from a false start
With a grandmother whose main endeavour
Was to get her married to a Bart.

Art for her was plaster casts of Praxiteles
Arundel prints and occasional days
At the Galleries admiring the ease
Of Alma-Tadema and the glaze
On a Dresden vase.

She painted water colours of Venice and the Fjords,
Kept a diary, strummed the harp in order
To display her arms, played Songs without Words
And read Scott's tales of the border.

Thackeray was preferred to Dickens
For he really understood
What went on in the drawing-room. Game chickens
And water-rats like Riderhood
Were to coarse for someone used to brood
On Struwwelpeter, Grimm and The Last of the Mohicans

Religion was a punctual attendance
At church on Sunday mornings at eleven,
Family prayers when the precedence
Of servants' hall was rigorously observed.
And hymns that yearned for a familiar heaven
Where pews for the gentry were reserved.

The really important thing to remember
Was who had married whom
Who had been a bridesmaid last December
And who was talking on the sofa to Lord Bohum.

Before she had completely sorted out Debrett
And coped with the Almanach de Gotha
Two major wars had upset
Her applecart, and after pawning her mink
She was reduced to scouring the sink
And subsisting on an occasional bloater.

Failing to get a preferential place
In a home for decayed gentlewomen
She was careful nevertheless
Before expiring in Pimlico to summon
The family lawyer and will her meagre monies
To the Society for Protecting Pit Ponies.

                        V
                  Threnody

He left us insouciant
(As he would have preferred)
Snuffing the unspeakable incense
Of the brand-new word.

To some of us (young) he had been
The type to throw off a triolet
Insult a policeman
Or recite the catalogue raisonné
Of the works of Uccello for a bet.

Capable of conjuring up more
Than the ghost of a rise
In the bed of Cleopatra
He abandoned himself to erotic reveries

Instead of fetching in the morning milk ;
Which led to his filling
Hack posts in provincial newspapers
Or preparatory schools. Bilk

Was his motto for tradesmen and whores
But toujours la politesse
To the beau monde. He saw this
As a Marxian way of paying off scores
Against an unappreciative society.

Spain provided embroidery
To deck out his fancy for a year
With infiltration and bridge-blowing
And the paraphernalia of guerilla war.

He posed us the relation
Of conviction to historical truth
And the further problem of
The validity of dialectical salvation.

We need not have bothered. He was able
(Before we had even begun
Our soul-searching) to show
Conclusively that Communism and Fascism were one.

How is one to put this down and not
Sound cynical? And yet
The values are correct, the lines generous
And the pattern taut.

The desert war gave vesture
To his vision of futility
And when the kites pecked at his pals
He could shoo them away with a gesture.

Back home there was nothing
But to re-turn the old pence
And repeat with increasing distaste
The old slogans injected
With the latest ambivalence.

Caught by a syncope near the Old Vic
Half-starved, je-m'en-foutiste,
His glazed eyes gave up the struggle
To equate logic and feeling
And he went out without a kick.

The new standards. The new word over all.
A door opening and closing
Like the iron wall
Of an even darker prison.