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

A seven-months’ baby
howling in the wilderness of his mother’s empty womb –
The naked, the hungry, the beggars
added one more to their ever-flourishing ranks
they honoured him:
they saved him a permanent place.

His twisted back
with its hump
     was a crooked bow –
its malformed shadows
drew scars on the skyline,
the blue dimmed to grey.

His father was a wily old pro,
a grand and glorious beggar.
Over all the bowl-lickers –
      what sway!
Hearing his voice
they scuttled out of his path,
such sonorous tones in his throat
you’d forget the bass of Pankaj.(1)

(It was a strange time
when in the gardens of Europe
acorns burst open,
then in Bengal and Panjab
in the lush lush fields
rice-shoots, corn-stalks
began to wilt.)

In that time
the father’s foresight
took the three-year-old
scrawny, scroungy thing,
with a snap! snap! broke
both its arms
made two more elbows,
his fame spread in all four directions.

‘Pardah . . .
           . . . pardah!(2)
Four-elbowed
Ram Charan the Hunchback
      has come.’

This voice broke the silence
of so many Sundays –
beyond all reckoning.

In his wooden boat with wheels
like an upturned turtle-shell,
moving his rudder-feet,
he jerk-jerked himself inside
up to the pardah screens,
slurp-slurped his food
out of cheap enamel plates,
and to Grandma’s shadow
babbled on at his ease.

This was the practice of sixteen years,
this was the rule: affection,
a stomach filled somehow.

One unlucky evening came,
he didn’t come.
Sitala the smallpox-witch came,
he didn’t come.
A great hue and cry
universal sadness
Mother and Grandma
sent the money
to have him burned.

He was burned to ashes –
holy ashes, that still
fly around in my soul
‘Pardah . . .
            . . . pardah!
Four-elbowed
Ram Charan the Hunchback
has come.’