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

It's the story he’s been hearing
since he was small enough
to slot into my lap like the last piece of the jigsaw,
his hard little tail nudging my groin
to be let back in.
We’d be crouched the way we are now
to his child’s atlas, where England’s
nothing much, South America
a yolkyellow kite
elbowing the upstreams.
Heads bowed, my frayed beech to his
dense black - to the petrol violet
depth of it that owes nothing
to English halftones,
between an armadillo and a palm
we’d make a place
for where he began:
“We’ll go,” I’d say, “all of us.
When you’re older. Soon.”

But today, he’s telling it, and just like that I see
I’m not there.
Not there as his blunt plane pants after the sun
a day, a night, another day,
not there when he stumbles out
to aquarium heat and shabby grass, suddenly
nowhere he ever dreamed of,
while all the gaps between the snapshots
wheel up to flap round him
like huge unwelcome birds.

Not there either when at last he can run,
arms outstretched, down the
crooked path between shacks
that cling to the river,
shedding as he goes his socks,
his Doc Marten boots, his
Fireman Sam shirt;
                              and shrinking
to smaller than he is now, growing thin
as the children were that I remember
and he doesn’t, outside shacks
just like these,
running to the mother he’ll know,
though he’s seen her just once,
when he pushed out of her.

There’s a pause with arms wrapped round each other,
the young woman with her tiny adorer,
before they lean back
from the waist to let each other see
how they do fit, what a match they are,
the dulce de leche skintones blending -

at a distance you hardly
can tell just where
his narrow wrist becomes hers.