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

It begins with one or two leaning in doorways, brows creased in concentration. Gradually, small groups form as the newspaper is passed from hand to hand and then meetings are arranged, to which I, the old lady at No 15, am not invited. Too harmless of course. I've survived too long to be anything else. But I suspect what really sets me apart is my accent which, though I have been here more than 60 years, I've somehow managed to keep. I lost everything else. I hear things, but I try not to listen as the avenue sighs its huge, suppressed whisper. I am sleeping badly and the old dreams have returned.

     I know him, of course. He's the only occupant in the block of four opposite me. All the other flats are boarded and battened down like coffins. He is a new face in the pension queue on Thursdays. We have exchanged a few polite, meaningless words: 'do you think it will rain again today?' 'Can't wait till it's Spring.' But mostly I see him every morning, through my window, heading in the direction of the park, alone. Always alone. But I don't know what impelled me to follow him that morning and to push the note at him as he stared, waxen-faced, out onto the lake. Then turn for home, head bent furtively against the slanting rain.

     When they fire the flat, their voices travel in the damp evening air like wolves howling. I hang back not wanting to be seen, but they notice me and one of them comes over and explains how difficult it had been to pour the petrol through the letter box. How they'd had to make a funnel out of paper. How the flame kept going out and they had to keep trying until it had taken hold. He looks closely at me, his eyes demanding complicity. ‘We missed him though,’ he hisses, ‘the bastard's done a runner.’ I avoid the hypnotic gaze and look beyond at the blackening bricks, at the children dancing down the street bearing placards reading PROTECT OUR CHILDREN, at the toddler asleep in her mother's arms. Long dark lashes against silken skin.

     Then, when it is almost over, sirens wail and I retreat inside, turn the radio up loud to block out the noise of the shouting, the fire engines, and the sound of breaking glass as the flat dissolves like tissue paper. I wait for the knock on the door and when it comes the policeman looks about 16 years old. 'No, I have seen nothing. No, I know nothing,' I tell him, keeping the chain on my door. I can see myself through his eyes. An old frightened face peering through the crack. 'If you do hear anything please let us know, Ms Weiss,’ he says and leaves with a trained, reassuring smile.

     That night, I dream I am six again. And, as dream melts into dream, I am fragmenting into a thousand pieces of silvered crystal. Then my mother is standing over me, gently shaking me. She is wearing a different face. 'Rühe, Liebling, wir mu'ss gehen' she whispers and I am wrapped in a blanket, carried down the back stairs and through the door into the darkness.