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

I

I was always an accomplice actor.

In my onewindowed room
I heard voices at weddings in
Cities where mothers know the
Glint of the moon, the spark of the cold.

These chants soar high to the
Cracks in my ceiling; become the ravens of
Beethoven’s last quartets; choruses to a goddess
By the Ganges, her skin as silt--black, her
Tongue limp, red with shame.

A fine wedding this-
Fugues of blood.

II

Shhh...

Red wine, a mosquito bite on my hand.

The rattle of rifles--sporadic
Rain that summer-outside our
Home in Calcutta--
A communist city,
No place for faith.

A mosque was raped in the north.

The city shuts. My mother eats the curls of her hair.
Hear the guns, shona! Hear the guns!
A child of twelve.
In my father’s absence, I invoke:

A street named after an Urdu poet where I was
Greeted with a smile by a leper
Balding with disease, her arms
Hanging like carcasses, her teeth
Black, her eyes--sweating streets
Of the city--crowded, with flies.

She held a dog’s mouth in her fist.
Not alive, not dead.

The city forms in veins.
Cut open.

III

I saw her for the next five months.
She watched me, sniffing--a
Huntsman on all fours--rain,
Sweat, typhoid, falling from my
Skin in bombs.

IV

Hungry. Need medicine. Crack
My knuckles. Gets
Cold at night. Mosquitoes. Pirates. Planes.
Flies on muttonsticks.
Partition. Brothers shaved my head. Others tied
Me by the legs. Whipped me. My nostrils groan.
The smell of coalmines.

Poisha dao!

The whiff of sandstone--
In Rajasthan, had mirrors on my dress.
A woman, pale skin, straddled the seas, gave it me.
Draped on head by wave of silk,
Red and yellow long snake on my lap...

V

I wade past the nightgirls,
Darkred bangles clattering,
Men with needles in arms seated round a temple like lotuses,
A rickshawpuller who starts selling hash, changes his name,
Becomes a Hindu just before the fast,

Couples stepping out of Japanese cars,
To make it on time for
Rehearsals of Chekhov’s short stories and plays.

VI

Shhh...

I write to her, my modernmedusa.
Smug. (A can of soup, in America).

Not alive, not dead.