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

Given half a chance
I’d be flying south
this winter, Icara sighed

Blood-shot eyes contracting
on the tail-back lights
red-dotting a motorway curve
beyond Brighouse

and its downhill, all the way
You used to tease, foot
hard on the accelerator

Thirty years ago
the pack of pills in my pocket
spelt a bare-back ride

and not half! By now
we were past a count
of awkward single beds
we'd managed to share

with belly to tear-jerking guffaws.
I, you insisted, right up to the
bitterest lemon of ends

was a definite Ratty
to your ongoing Moley
as the wind whispered
countless invitations

through our willow past
midnight. Children of the mid-war
stringencies we warmed from the first
glance to each others version

of the past: shared thoughts on Civil War
necessities, sadly sometimes;
sang The Internationale, you taught me

in a hotch-potch of languages. We laughed;
the tune remained the same, underlying
a bond beyond any closed-door domesticity

Trees we got planted down Scarletts Road
may have outlasted our attempts
to keep all the balls soaring

and batten down the hatches, all ship-shape
Bristol fashion, against a magnificent folie
à deux; increasingly exhausted, we had to
admit our love could fail

us.

Yet afterwards, after the final punctuation
of our mutual skin across the Kingdom of Fife
rural Essex and a kaleidoscope of Paris quarters;
impromptu escapes via the route to the relentless southern sun

you’d send me copy of your Auden, our Rosa Luxemburg
Austen’s and Byron’s Letters; a little blue card
to raise funds for the 84 Miners’ Strike.

Since I rode north, that arid March
another sun-dissolving day
a van jam-packed with my, some of your and some of our
shared things, I have no car

but memories waxing at odd times north and south
melting into rear lights without distinction.
And the untreated upper vertebrae

Whiplashed once during a stupid fratch
are notched, as though gnawed over time
by our own home-grown dogs, obsessive as usual about
perfecting their little bones.

But hush, old love
the film has begun
‘Lepa Sela, Lepo Gore’- *
one of the languages we might have invented
to amuse ourselves through Scottish nights
that once began in the afternoon at something to three

I am almost seeing as with you
side by side, thighs tight packed
out of blackness a former country:

another desired success
which could still set the Continent alight

‘Lepa Sela, Lepo Gore’
                                       when love fails