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

It was not bruised light on the tricycles
or the Subbuteo baize reminded me of where
I was, but waking in the lean-to play room,
the duvet sliding off me on the put-up bed,
under perspex brocaded with green fungus.

And someone in the ward felt strong, as daylight
sashayed through the happy curtains, a chair moved
by itself between two beds. They were emptying
our little boy before his operation; above his head
a hand scrawled note read, 'Nil by mouth'.

They spent a long time trying to find a vein;
when Sister said that there were easier veins in babies' heads,
my wife's face leant into her hands and tears
squeezed themselves between her fingers.
'What a temper!' Sister said about the baby.

The registrar was haunted by his tailor;
fresh faced, public schooled, his sharp jacket
parried all our questions till I blew my top.
The women in the parents' room wore fluffy mules,
quilted dressing gowns, black eyeliner

and were mostly bleached blond. They ordered pizza
into the small hours and wouldn't stop smoking.
There was just a single 'get-well' card for Ben
and that was from the Mother of the cot next door
in the ward that they'd just moved us from.

In the other cot the babies came and went.
One was dark-haired, chubby, hydrocephalic;
his forehead buckled by a fracture. Only he
knew how to play; his parents sat in flaming
silence, his mother mute with anger.

Nurses made Josh special, sang and held him;
at eighteen months, he fed through a wine tap
in his stomach and focussed on nothing.
He mewed and squealed at the birds he saw
and played cat's cradle with no string.

In that feeble March we'd take Ben out
into the park, in a heavy, elderly pram,
its C springs sighed and whistled to the ducks.
The anglers catapulted maggots to the fish
and waited for the scruffy lake to yield.

At seven pm, the night staff gathered, chiaroscuro
by the angle-poise, an inflated cartoon rabbit
floated in and out of light above them.
A drip machine called from darkness by a bed,
was attended, readjusted, calmed and stilled.

Our son was quiet again. Laundered curtains cut
one darkness from another, between them
I could see, beside the outside perspex doors,
two men, vague, particoloured, faces thrawn
in poor light, nubbing out their cigarettes.