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

Trebah is a sub-tropical garden in Cornwall, situated on the Helford estuary.  On 1st June 1944, a regiment of 7,500 men of the 29 US Infantry Division embarked from Trebah Beach for the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy, where they suffered grievous casualties.

I don’t need to be told not to sow
for three days at the beginning of March –

all my days these days are blind days, the moon’s
face, blank and white, looks in from time to time –

doesn’t say a word, so I don’t hear her come
and don’t hear her go – night and day are all

the same shade of grey in this country
of the dead. Winters never end in the garden

where everyone’s blind, standing stock-still
on our shallow roots each side of the valley,

aching for spring. None of us speak though
we hear signs of life – voices of people and birds,

distant hum of boats and planes, wind
stroking the leaves. They tell me I’m naked

but how would I know – with no limbs left to wrap
round my trunk to test the touch of my skin or feel

for the moss-covered heartbeat of the tree
they can’t name or to prise loose chunks of bark

from the Monterey pine, let them fall heavy as slate,
cold as old armour from tanks rumbling down

the rapidly-poured concreted track – nor can I shake
a rich head of hair like the evergreen willow –

nothing moves in me now – no sap rises, no leaves fall,
no swinging branch to lift then drop a child down

to where things might go better – as we wanted them
to in nineteen forty four. Then, sunshine pulled desire

up from my roots, my leaves quivered and rose.
Girls of Cornwall bloomed all around, opened

to the young oaks of soldiers so full of promise,
responding with beauty – their thighs pink and silken

as spring magnolias, they flounced lip-sticked and frilled,
filled with the red lust of sudden rhododendrons –

whole minefields of blonde daffodil heads
on the slopes of these gardens – everything flourishing

until those goodbyes when hundreds of handkerchiefs
from a tree full of ghosts dropped sodden into the grass.

One uniformed man, tall as a pine, mysterious
as an ash tree in March, was mindful of memory.

He scarred me with his pocket knife – sap bleeding
through the date he wanted none to forget – gouging

my skin, sharing the pain of being here now, then,
a year soon only trees will remember, before running

from the enclosed garden of innocence, down to the sea
crossing to another world, one of lolling heads,

heavy as araucaria seeds, shrapnel sharp
as monkey puzzle leaves, the squelch of bodies

soft and open as toads in bamboo, tight knuckled
as bone on old branches – and beyond, furnaces

where people burn easy as seasoned wood,
jungles where, like the sudden death of a million

healthy oaks, men fall under the blows of those
who love cherry blossom. I don’t need to be told

not to sow for three days at the beginning of March –
I’m limbless, silent, scarred, dead from the neck up.

All my days are blind days. I can’t see the sun nor feel
on my branches the blood red of a passing robin’s breast.