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

Old age -
with the hotel teddy bear
I share my double room

I sit the bear in morning sunlight. Downstairs, spreading Scotch marmalade evenly across my toast, I remember to wish myself some Happy Returns. How ridiculous, one birthday after another! But by now - or at least on a morning like this - the mystery has become an old tweed jacket.

Bronze Age standing stone
a robin perches
just long enough to shit

Still breaking in new boots; which pair today? The ancient wrinkled ones? Or these new, impossibly smooth?

I stop off at Vivienne Rollo’s seafood bar. Erotic reverie. Deftly she squeezes the shellfish from their shells, and adds a few bannocks to my lunch box.

And so, immortal I stride out along the stalker’s path.

Halting these crunching boots
a mountain’s silence
celebrates my birthday

Tall rock sills rise ahead, tiered one upon another. My fingers trace fossil worm casts in the cliff, their hundred thousand years mocking my seventy-two. Higher still, in the glacier-scooped corrie, there lies, deep blue, a kidney-shaped lochan. Here, at over two thousand feet, transparent flies dance in the noon sun. I find a rock that fits my bony back.

Scraped smooth by ice
this warm stone bed
of blue and yellow lichens

Ahead a scree fan spills out from between two huge buttresses. The ascent is toilsome, ever upward over stones the size of a man’s head. I meet the wind on the top of the ridge, another world away - bleak tundra home of the ptarmigan.

Summit cairn
frail among ghosts
I start a hare

Back across the moor the ground falls steeply through scrub birch to a ruffled lochan. A pair of grebe drift on the wind - close and apart, apart and close. Recalling the hermitage of a friend long ago, I hasten towards a familiar grove of pines. See, biting deep in its block, here is his axe! It is thick with rust. I grip its heft .

His tepee wrecked -
In the saucepan
last year’s leaves

Sadly I descend to a tumble of old sheepfolds and broken boundary walls. Great round stones spotted with white lichen. Hard labour here, lost to living memory, and now no more than a passing thought. But something else...

Knife thrust and rusted - 
in the dry stone wall
a handle of bone