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

It’s hard to imagine a house less aptly named.
Three years we lived immured by its faulty electrics,
caretakers of its two dark corridors,
the draughty rooms that opened from them, the rats
that huddled for warmth in the corner cupboard
of the 1960s-decorated kitchen.

By daylight, peacocks strutted over the lawns.
Blown scraps of their voices reached to where my boy
double-dug rows of weed-choked flowerbeds,
or to where I stood at an upstairs casement, watching
his boot on the blade, his hands on the spade-handle, working
into and into the soil. I had thought it a miracle
that anything might grow there, but it did.

Those wind-blown cries that made my blood
stop short were simple courting calls. They held
no message for us, but my heart
felt the weight of them. At night the peacocks perched,
grotesquely large, in trees outside the windows.

It’ll be fine again tomorrow, my sweetheart whispers
into the dark, some fifteen years ago.
It is early autumn and we two are lying
flat on the moon-drenched lawn, our eyes
fixed heavenwards; the slowly crumbling house
although we cannot see it is afloat
somewhere beneath our feet – this woman,
who is me, and her dark-haired boy.
Something about the way the light has fallen,
or the way their outstretched hands seem fastened,
each to each, like two cut-paper dolls,
tells me it’s already too late to warn them,
the long day done and even the peacocks silent.