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

We went to root them out, but spent the whole afternoon
down at the allotment, eating the brambles, relishing
the sweetness, the faint acidity; our fingers and our mouths
stained red and blue-black. That plant knew the art of seduction -
just how much sharpness, how much sweetness it had to grant
to keep us eating on forever, without the danger of satiety.

No point in wasting ripe fruit, we thought, and brought them
home in buckets, proud as if it was a harvest we had grown.
We boiled some, and let them drip all night through muslin,
gathering into a disk of blackness with a sound like little kisses,
and when the jars were filled, they had a dark translucency,
as if each held a spark of ruby fire, a glowing ember in the jelly.

The next day we returned with spades, forks and secateurs.
We worked back into the plot from the gate, from the tips of   
                                                                                         bramble
shoots,
barbed whips that snaked under cover of couch-grass and dusty nettles
to junctions where they’d slithered out in all directions
and webbed the place with harm. The roots’ bunched tentacles
were clamped on and thrust into the soil, bleeding it dry

and when we dug them out they looped back to others; they
had back-flipped and leapfrogged like razorwire, they had risen up in a Mexican wave engulfing elderberry, hawthorn, rosehip advancing on us. Our clothes were ripped and underneath
our flesh a mass of lacerations. Barbed tendrils snapped around our ankles,
tripped us, but we hacked on until the branches were cut and 
                                                                                            heaped

together with a mass of forked-up roots. Later, in the evening,
we stuffed paper and kindling in with gloved hands, then lit the bonfire,
standing by with cans of water to damp the dry grass. The sappy shoots
writhed, hissed and spat, entwined with wreaths of acrid smoke
that made us cough, our eyes smart. But then the fire took off, the heat
made our scratches throb and sting. The corrugated leaves

caught the light and glimmered like foil as they turned to ash.
We saw each other’s faces flicker in the glow as the pile subsided.
Victorious? No. We were carriers now, part of the plot -
our aching bellies stuffed with seeds, like the birds that spattered the
pavement with purple cream, like the small animals that die in hedgerows,
from whose spent stomachs brambles spiral out.