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

The view from our hotel balcony was always stunning
- and never more so than the night we dropped the baby.

(Michael Jackson had nothing on us!
I guess he’d be gratified to know
that he paled by comparison.)

You can have no idea how long it takes
for such a precious object to fall three floors.
From where I stood, it felt like drowning
- watching my whole life rushing by;
though as he was only one year old
I’m sure it was momentary for him.

Maybe we were distracted by the fireflies dancing
on the water; or, in a red-wine moment of weakness,
we held each other so tight that I lost my grip on reality.
Unthinkable! How could we let it happen?

As it happened, he landed in the bougainvillea
- petal-stained but intact.

In postcards home, we never mentioned it
- too ashamed of the brush with death;
though he came away without so much as a scratch.

Somewhere, I’ve seen a classical painting
- ‘Madonna and Child’; the snow-white infant
kicking his heels on a scarlet cloth and smiling up
at his virgin mother; blood-red brushstrokes
lapping like waves at the baby’s heavenly form.

Sometimes, in the hush of evening, I still see him -
my little angel! - red and rosy with health, snug
in the scarlet bracts of the bougainvilleia,

smiling up to a whitewashed balcony;
safe in the arms of a surrogate mother
who seems to be doing the job far better than I.

And my heart goes out to that slip of a girl
in the painting - that other, watchful mother
who played by the Book and never put a foot wrong;

unjustly rewarded with the inconceivable pain
of living as long as it took to watch Him die.