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

This year, I’ve borrowed a country.
A stranger, I can feel it ride

its haggard seas – never more than a hundred
miles away – wearing a veiled hat

made of rain and air-raid memories, breathing
its air with a sigh of small martyrdom.

No cognate, no American word for it
in the pocket dictionary I’m thumbing

on the bus up Mill Road, past tandooris,
past the Salvation Army shop, where yesterday

I bought five silverplate teaspoons,
the curve of each bowl worn to copper

from stirring, tapping, setting down
on some table – lord knows where it is

now – the way my son as a baby
rubbed the hair from the back of his head

by sleeping all night in one position.
Past the darkening playground, where two

teenage girls straddle swings, smoke and talk,
rocking themselves idly with their feet.

*      *      *

High on the square building’s prow,
a room waits, though I’ve carried it with me

all day: a row of teacups, their handles
turned in unison toward the door. My daughter’s

outgrown image, framed in green, fingering
a wilted black-and-yellow pansy,

laughing as the shutter bit down
on her shape, printing it against the dry

light of a Utah afternoon.
Now she bends her head above her spellings:

Come, went. Baby, angel. Has, had.
Twilight spills its bluing on her page.

Standing in the street, looking up
at the blank bright window, I know

how her hand curls around her pencil,
how her letters cramp themselves into sense.

How her brother kneels on the diamond-patterned rug,
scatters his wooden blocks, shouting, because

he can: there’s nothing holding them together,
nothing holding anything except

my voice, which fills the half-lit stairwell’s
cold cobwebby air; which says I’m home.