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

We’re a bit mad in our family:
Wear hand-me-down clothes
Never throw anything away.
We even mend things with glue and string
Like wellies with splits in sometimes
We know it won’t work
But we have to try.

Dad still winds Grandfather’s clock
No one notices when
But it keeps ticking, recalling the hours
The memories when nothing was wasted.

Call me old fashioned
But I don’t care about fashions
Besides it’s cool to be uncool nowadays.
             Call me out of touch
But I don’t care about technological improvements —
Grandmother’s kettle boils just as well
When the rayburn gets going.
             Has communication improved since text and e-mail?

You said that clothes are the way we express ourselves
A representation of the integrity of the personality.
People could think what they like. Girl I said
You’re wasting your breath, I still wear
My old school jumper.
            You said I should live in the present,
Not the past, not the future, not in possibilities, now.
I said The best things in life are free. And Timing is everything.

And seriously, I’ve always believed that the one you love
Comes fi rst.
But also that love isn’t enough.
You have to respect to try to understand
What they value, and why they do what they do —
Know that: when you try to change them
They’ll change you.

That has all been said before:
A paraphrastic study in a worn-out dogmatic language
Where the words of all the individuals of all the ages merge.
Forgive me.