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

I know where your curved windows come from!
She barred my way in the Cornmarket,
her smile big with esoteric knowledge,
coyly proud of her sibylline gambit.
Four of my bungalow’s windows indeed are
curved like a lovely woman’s cheekbone,
their glass thin and smoky blue in strong sunlight.
They came from Cadwell Hall when it was auctioned.

Prompted by this encounter, I dug in libraries
and archives, drove out one crisp February morning
to Cadwell, to where the old hall had once stood.
The wolds curved away all round, some etched green with winter
wheat, some flecked cream with flintstones.

Old photos had revealed a handsome building,
a home for a large family and servants:
General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby
was born here where rooks now called and jackdaws
answered from a thicket luminous with snowdrops.
The liberator of Jerusalem from the Ottoman
had once played with his lead soldiers
in front of a fire that sent up a column
of heat and smoke into the big Lincolnshire sky,
had caught his parents’ indulgent smiles
before looking out through curved windows,
hearing Armageddon’s bugles, imagining Megiddo.

Snug before my fire, my play is with coincidences.
In the year the sun danced at Fatima and the Bolsheviks
rearranged Russia’s features - they thought for ever -
he realised his vision, that glimpse of glory he caught as a child
through these my old curved windows.
Reminding myself that space, the scientists say,
and therefore time too, is curved but failing
to see any victories in the offing, or any angels,
I take some unexpected comfort from recalling
having read somewhere his name in Arabic -
Allah-en-nebi -
means, always meant:
Prophet of God.