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

In Golder’s Green the trees are red with blood,
the roses, too; and thus more beautiful.
There would seem little point in coming here:
place a few flowers, (expensive), on the earth,
suppress the involuntary tear

you knew would be there. Yet the satisfaction
a poor ritual gives is real - unlike that hollow
jocularity of carnal, red-nosed Christmas. Why,
I find difficult to say, perhaps I don’t know.
Know only in this pause, essential

as in music, I do more than remember my mother,
as I gaze at what strangely remains of her:
a barren rose-bush in Golder’s Green.
A moment or two of mortality, shaped by crimson
of autumn trees, half-redeemed by the roses.

Change of scene. Purple carpets in Swiss Cottage: Grandma’s.
Typical of her. I’d say with hindsight: vivacious
at ninety, (plus?), claiming to be eighty - just;
still secretive about her visits to the ‘dressmaker’,
despite plentiful helpings of lockshen pudding. And those spas

she waltzed in! The tales she didn’t tell were legendary,
or should be. Refusing to marry her arranged match:
‘a man too mean to call a cab’, when the rain
was ruining her best silk dress, she married instead
my hard-working, ginger-haired Grandpa. A tolerable catch,

as it turned out. Though so familiar with Shakespeare was he
that when leaving theatricals, and Poland,
he changed his name to Julius, no less, deeming it ‘more English’.
But business, built on a fiver, flourished. A would-be
partner only proffered a herring. Grandma made a stand:

they went it alone; and in time she was free
to fly with my father in his two seater plane
to Weisbaden, often, and take the waters for her infamous tummy,
or so she claimed. Once for a month, she could only obtain
a bed for half the night. So she danced ’till dawn

as usual, and slept the odd hour. She was getting on, even then,
but seemed content with her makeshift ‘Dat’ll do’ system.
Her last words: a joke against herself while her best friend
soothed, ‘Don’t worry ! You’ll see your gigolo again.’
But a barren rose-bush beckons me, in Golder’s Green.