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

I don't remember where her grave is.
It wasn't marked.
At the burial we stood on a slope
and looked downhill to the hole.
But the cemetery is all slopes,
rising and falling,
oceanic, its billows packed
with fish like her -long,
pale and passive,
rocked in subterranean
submarine liquids.

Am I fishing for her here -to
one side of that sea
under a full-leafed lime tree,
a sort of potter's field behind,
thick with hedge and nettles
where a suicide might lie down
and never be found?

Brief rain. The lime
is dense enough to shield me.
Was this the tree
where they found that hanging girl?
Strange how such thoughts
feel quite un-morbid here,
in death's backyard.

Rockabye baby to the next world.
The next world is a small room,
sand turned to moss,
its back wall made of reindeer bone,
the side wall of a cricket's bone,
the door wall of an apple tree,
the writing of a fly's bones.

Gentle, gentle. Don't wake the child
whose stone reads 'born asleep'.
Even the sailor has been ‘called aloft’
to a crow's-nest that's soft-lined
with feathers, bog-cotton fluff -
tiny enough to hunker down in
and doze, lulled by small waves.

All the little rooms - like a hotel,
or private hospital when after dinner
naps are taken on command and
only a few figures creep upright
with flowers in their diffident hands;
like a monastery whose inmates
lie quiet and make their souls.

I would come from ballet class -
along the adjacent road
where the doorways said to me 'Salve' -
to the cemetery gates
across from my bus stop,
knowing there was time to go inside.

I had no taste.
I liked the mawkish angels
that leaned lugubriously
above tombs in their charge.
A teacher warned my mother
I was 'obsessed by death'.
'Isn't everyone at that age?'
she replied.

Though none of my fellows
trawled the grass between the graves
when the wild-flower competition
came around again at school.

There were more varieties
of stamen and sepal and bract
than our books could name;
and the angels very
very seriously
overlooked those unmown verges.

Under the ground is the great unknown place.
We can never never alive swim down
through the soil, simply shifting
its grains aside with our paddle hands;
no glass mask will let us see ahead
and bring up 'pearls that were his eyes'.

What giant octopuses might simmer there,
what catacombs of unicorns lie undiscerned
beneath ordinary paths? Under our feet
a whole cabinet of curiosities assembled
long ago and then forgotten, extremophiles
living impossibly on poisons inside stone.

The bones they believed to be of one of
the fallen angels were dug out of the earth
in 1842 by slaves on Judge Creagh's Alabama
plantation - though Melville in Moby Dick
identifies the "angel" as whale 'of a departed
species', discounting shrivelled vestigial wings.

Lily Brazier 'passed into spirit'
along the thermal above her stone
in this suburb of the dead
where the rows are straight
and each grave has its allocated lawn.
I leaned on hot squared-off granite

to note how Mary Podger died
'after a lingering illness of thirty-two years'.
Her younger husband just out lived her.
I imagine their closed-in life
prolonged within the tomb.

The rhetoric of the epitaphs lurches,
spoilt by the awkward aggrandising
of bodies, names. Just when
the rhythm of each inscription
signals its imminent conclusion,
there's 'also of’ to start it up again.

'Lovely, loveable, loving and much beloved'
Anne Gibbs; Edgar Brown whose middle name
was Marriage; and though most
were 'called home' or 'entered into rest',
sometimes the stone cries 'taken from me'.
Small children's graves are closest to the paths.
I don't know where hers is.
She has no epitaph.