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

The flat land has a ceiling of folded-under clouds.
In the suburban copse every green leaf glows
with winter-stored light. Ferns and bluebells both
have soft spring-coil tops.
                    The head-down boy, alone
on the allotments’ rutted track, is surprised
by the rain, runs to the side of the nearest shed;
but, even pressed hard against it, still he is
getting wet. The grey wood of the boards, he notices,
is fingersoft and easily pulled aside. A gap made
he ducks through to the dusty inside, snags
his jacket on a black bent-over nail. Angered
by the right-angled rip, looking for a place to sit,
he scatters scratched plastic pots and bottles
from of f an up-ended box, squats
and listens to the easing rain.
                    A squelch of footsteps brings
an old man crouching with the twisted stiffness
of a tree. His trunk and head block the light.
                    “I see what you did!”
                    The boy lunges towards
and past him, out through the torn hole,
snapping more wood. He turns, flushed and defiant.
The old man, age gathered in purse-pleats around
his mouth and eyes, sees the boy wanting only
to be right. He shakes his drenched head,
                    “Imagine how the owner must feel.”
                    But the boy can’t.
Can’t know how to be another when he doesn’t, yet,
know how to be himself. All he owns are grievances,
one piled atop the other. All that he examines now,
walking away, is the tear in his jacket.
                    With the old man gone too, back
to his plot, then come the scavengers - to last year’s seeds
spilt from the jamjars and the pots - jackdaw rat-callers
and a pair of collared doves, pristine
in their biblical beauty.