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

It is 1940, the bitter cold of late January. Bombs are falling
on London. My grandmother is dying of pneumonia.
She is only in her thirties. She has two children, a boy and a girl;
Her maiden name was Hale. Meaning luck and health and fortune.
And perhaps this was her life till now, a wave of luck and happiness
bearing her into the arms of Arthur, who will become
my grandfather; bringing her to safety after childbirth,
healed and made whole, her family complete.
She was, in the years before the war began, robust and vigorous,
free from infirmity, though her chest had always been weak,
and what with the war and the winter, the worry, the rationing,
she’s growing weaker. Her body is a place roofed over
but open at the sides: open to germs and infections.

It is January, 1940, and she is lying in bed, and death
is trying to pull her, draw her forcibly into a condition
which she does not want. But perhaps in the hallucinations
of sickness she will leave that room where sisters-in-law attend her,
and be taken on a sailing ship set to proceed before the wind.
She will lie there listening to an exclamation of sailors
as the ship comes to an island in the turquoise sea
and here by the seafront is a pavilion, a tent, where she may rest,
free from disease, her lungs in the warm air sound and undecayed.
She’ll watch as a fishing boat arrives, and the fishermen
heave their haul of fish, their heap of gleaming silver,
into barrows; and when someone wants to buy a pound or so,
the handle of a barrow will be lifted and the fish tipped out.

But this comes to and end. Fate has taken the handle of the plough
and has finished furrowing the short track of her life. Fate says,
You will not live to see your children grow. You will not see
the end of war. You will not be recovered from disease. Fate
propels her, pushes her towards death. Who does not listen
when she asks about her children, but hastens her, rushes her,
takes her forcibly away, drags and hauls her off.
It seems that all the good things in my grandmother’s name –
all that was whole and healthy – have been pushed away.
Her family, once unbroken, is cracked apart:
who will see to their welfare now? Her maiden name
is poured away, all meaning has flowed out of it.
The temporary shelter of her life so easily dismantled.