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

I sit on the lowest step of a pyramid made of the same colour
             granite I picked to mark my mother’s grave,
rose speckled with black and grey in three darknesses,
among concrete urns overflowing with gauche longstemmed
           impatiens.
Around me move plump cleanshaven men with flowered
            neckties and stiff briefcases,
soft men in sweaters walking slowly, white hair falling into
            their eyes,
young women in threes clutching wallets and laughing,
thin polished women hurrying in raincoats and flat shoes:
heading back to carpeted offices after lunch,
pausing to light cigarettes and look up at the narrow sky,
talking with expressive hands at white plastic cafe tables.

Pigeons also go about their business on the pink granite floor
           of the plaza,
pacing with plump throats throbbing at every step.
Some wear more mineral green and violet on their smooth
           necks,
some have stuck-up whitish feathers rumpled as if from a
             clothes dryer,
but all wear the padded grey uniforms of pigeons in London,
            Manhattan, New Haven,
the same birds of cathedrals, quadrangles, fountains and war
            memorials
I fed crusts to as a child, wrote first poems about in college.

And I notice I am also dressed in grey this afternoon:
my mother’s Paris wool, Ann Arbor thrift store pleats, a coat
            a student left at my father’s house,
a scarf cross-striped in two shades of grey silk from the
           Chicago grandmother I have no memory of;
pieces of travellers and destinations both far away and with
            me now
as I watch here in the hours between buses in and out of San
           Francisco,
clothed in the grey of mirror-striped skyscrapers looking
           down over the painted cornices of older buildings,
the grey of the November sky charged with thin sunlight,
the grey of cigarette ashes falling from the white plastic cafe
            tables,
the grey of the curly hair of a woman eating ice cream with
             her young daughter,
grey as the crystal flecks of granite shining throughout this
            downtown plaza
where generations of uniformed pigeons bow suddenly,
            politely, to gifts of crumbs.