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

 Winter of 1944-45. Stalin is still a darling, still a Movietone News Hero spread wide across all our hearts, still the wise, caring Father of victorious and grateful children, and entrenched leader of the everlasting Revolution. Hitler, horribly lost inside the black distemper of paranoia, might be realizing that being semi-cognizant visually and semi-literate architecturally does not equate with ethical probity. I am still years from the 11+ examination that will wobble me into a NewModelLand of PublicSchoolSimulacra and daily return me to where I ineptly ape RuggedGuyModels and curvaceous shapes remain hidden inside the illusion of distant light breaking into shimmering sparkles. It is a harsh winter in which nothing is spared. We frazzle at the edges of interior climactic turmoil.
   Suddenly, in this burnt townscape, Mum says she is going to visit a younger sister whose husband I never ever heard speak, who works at a Joe Lyons Corner House in a posh part of London, who might have modeled anti-Semitic Nazi posters and how I am going with her and “isn’t it lovely I can play with my cousins and...”
   A younger and older cousin some place else, sisters blasting away, a silent uncle; a red-hot recipe for a stir-fry of a boring afternoon. I am bored. Silent Uncle silently slips me a book and nods towards a bedroom. It is old. History of Sporting Jews. Not interested in sport I flick at it, desultorily glancing at whatever irregular pages turn up. It seems a mishmash of sports, biographies, unfamiliar names, photographs.
   Then the shock of seeing the only photograph I will ever see of a bipedal dad! Before he is a dad of three voracious sons, of course! A photograph of a teenager with no teenage amputation. I am surprised and shaken to see it, proud he sparred with Kid Lewis, that rarity among blasting Jews of being a Boxing World Champion. Still it does not seem what I know is the natural order of things. This ancient, fading photograph, printed on vapour-thin paper, is an equation not easy to solve viewed in the here-and-now. A yellowing, 2 dimensional valediction, this is an unfamiliar history that shows a basis of sinewy solidity and firmly planted roots. It just does not add up, does not seem right. 1 leg is for real. Here the pose is of hope, a move up-and-away from distended poverty. Here, on this butterfly page, is no hurt or even fruit of perpetual discomfort. Here two legs, balance and hold up a surreal, static convention. For as long as my forever he has swung one leg in three-dimensional space, even when extraneous parts of the picture remain flatly 2 D. These two legs are what freak me. Does he have other secrets to be discovered in some hidden paperback? Before going home I silently give the book back to my silent Uncle whose face structure makes him always seem to have a left-eye wink.
   I will never tell him I discovered his sporting secret. To remain authentic, he can never ever tell me there is a secret.

                          photograph fades
                          his static pose
                          moves me