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

Yes, there is blood on my hands
but Pitcairn has blood-coloured
sunrise and sunset on every rock.
And those ableseamen, Quintal, McCoy,
Williams, lusting after the Tahitian women
treating the men like Carib slaves.
Their jealousies festered like the carbuncles
of seamen below decks. Now they’re all dead
just two or three white men left alive,
the Tahitian women and their half-caste children -
my Isabelle, my children too.
So you want to know about the mutiny.
It happened inevitably - Bligh had it coming
with his foul obscenities - it was
more than I could bear from someone
I thought respected me:
And yet on Otaheite, a sort of Puritan
watching the penis-dancers of the Arioi
then feigning shock and injured decency.
Once at sea again things grew worse,
the infernal dancing to that blind man’s fiddle,
and the last straw those coconuts
his private hoard on deck
piled up beside the breadfruit trees.
Bligh engineered it all, accused us
of stealing his coconuts. I wonder
what he thought we’d do,
Fryer the master, myself, the midshipmen.

I watched them, Bligh and his cronies
drifting off in that long boat
how did they get back?
How did I get back,
but here I am, ten years later
in Nether Stowey, an ancient mariner
old before my time,
returned from that far-off voyage
repentant, triumphant, I’m not sure which.
Christian, the pilgrim, I’ve climbed
out of the Slough of Despond.
Fletcher, I’ve flailed my enemies.

I was no more a rebel than most
as a boy. When I rode my piebald
pony past your house to school,
I saw you two at play,
William and Dorothy, beside the Derwent
catching butterflies. Sometimes I’d
truant at the back end of the week.

Once I climbed the roof of the summer house
desperate for the apples overhanging.
Sour green they were,
skins hard curled so you chewed
and spat like old men with tobacco,
and the juice dry on your tongue.
My footprint’s on the mortar where
my father fixed the gutter to the roof.
That was a double beating
one from my father Friday night
and one from school the following week
and in between an unrepentant Sunday
filled with hymns and prayers.
Another time I stole a boat
rowed from Ambleside to Belle Isle
on Windermere to see my cousin John
and Isabelle Curwen, his wife from Workington.
Strange how life works your passage -
I didn’t care for water as a boy
never dreamed of going to sea,
hated those holidays crossing the water
from Whitehaven to Ramsey on the Isle of Man,
refusing to be seasick, tossed
in summer gales on sliding decks
wishing I’d been born a Manxman.
But when father died we had to leave
our home at Euanrigg in Cumbria
go back to the Isle of Man for good.
And that’s how Bligh came into my life
or I into his, damn his eyes.
I curse the day he came to Douglas
married a Manx girl, Betsy Betham.
At first I liked his pale white skin
blue eyes, black curly hair
but now I loathe the thought of it -
when I had him tied to the mizzen mast
the rope caught his nightshirt -
it made me sick to see his hair black
around his genitals.