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

We sat there and watched her
talking to us, the old lady,
but in that place we could only
partly listen. All day in their
wheel-chairs with only their mouths
moving, they were like so many
tape-recorders that had been left running,
and no one to hear.

I kept looking at the puffy face
and the purpled veins that had broken
round her eyes, and found myself
thinking that since Mrs Brown of number one
had died, there was no one now
who called her Elsie. We had no need
to listen; we’d heard her stories
all before. This one was about the time
she’d almost died of rheumatic fever
and the men had put down straw
in the street so that she could sleep
and not be wakened by the carts
and horses clattering over the cobbles.
Sometimes when she was telling it
there were certain words that stepped out
of the monologue and seemed to open windows
onto the Edwardian London of her girlhood,
when in button-boots she tripped down Tooley Street
and stopped to flirt and giggle
at the chestnut-seller’s stall;
such homely words and ordinary things
that make you wonder when your time
of telling comes what it will be
that you’ll find precious but goes for granted now.

When the bell sounds and it’s time for us
to get up and go, conscience tells us
that it ought to be our love and care for this
frail and frightened lady, who once
bore us, but who now, were we to be truthful,
even to ourselves, tends just to bore us.
But in all her stories I find I
cannot remember one about her mother,
and her mother’s mother is simply a maternal
fact that I have to assume. Real
human history, it would seem, is like this:
just a dreary series of selves.