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

i. Sedation

Her child is running past fields
where policemen in waxed coats are raking
the undergrowth, then down by the lake
where they'd fed the ducks, but this time
the frogmen are diving deep, hooking trainers
and bits of inner tube.
                                        Cut to the meeting
with the press, where she is over-exposed
and cameras flash red dots in her eyes
and she can taste mascara in her mouth
as she pleads for witnesses.
                                        Then back to her child
who has stopped by the site where a digger
scoops earth, and in the films there's always
a white hand poking through silt like
unwanted crockery; but the child
turns the corner and skips down their lane
where the cherries are weeping and sniffer dogs
chained at each gate pick up her scent
and pant in the heat.
                                        Over to the station
where travellers are pigeons flapping
this way and that, past a child's face
that's stuck on the pane at Information,
but a fibre-tipped moustache is daubed
on the glass, over her mouth, and nobody
sees the joke.
                                         Hurry back to her child
who has reached their front door and is
captured on pause; just look at her socks
rucked at her ankles, her bus-pass face
and that ballpoint heart stretched on her hand,
as she turns the handle, turns the handle.

ii. Awake

Morning is a still-warm space
in the bed where her husband was.
But the tea he has left has gone cold.
She puts on what she took off last night
since today will be worn like the rest.

She will walk through waste ground
just for a glimpse of a hoola-hoop spinning,
the neon logo of a bicycle frame,
a rope bending to a skipping song.

She will come home alone; bide time
dusting the spare room shelves.
Books. Toys. Pop star icons.
The door never opens. A trailing plant
fills the sunless porch, clinging to empty spaces.