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

You call it home still, this impervious village
Hedged by the brooding towns of Merseyside,
And when, as now, the unremitting siege
Of London’s urgency saps what relief
Familiarity and friends provide
You still retreat here, sure as a child again
Of what you’ll find.  Beyond the new estates
The level fields fray into industry.
Skelmersdale stains a hillside to the north
Like a dark sprawl of undergrowth, and southward
The cooling towers of St Helens change
Like living things under the moody light.
A mast or two pinpoints the fringe of Kirby.

I know you well - at times, it seems, our roots
Touch blindly grasping at the same poor soil
For sustenance it cannot give - and yet
Now, as I mould these unfamiliar places
Half in surprise and half as if remembering
To those reliefs your poems mapped, I know
Too that for all your words the land lies differently
Here to your family eyes.  Your roots are here.
Your accent broadens under this slow sky
Where cousins crowd and aunts skulk behind windows
In ambushes of gossip.  By the church
The nearest headstone marks where the land reclaimed
Your mother’s grandfather, and just beyond
The rec is loud with desultory children
As when you played there.  Even the tangled clutch
Of blackberries along the disused railway
Catches at memories telling can never share.

Yours is a different circle now.  To these
Proud mothers, once your schoolfriends, who sun prams
Beside the climbing frame or wheel them round
To grandmothers, your mother’s schoolfriends, you
Too are a weekend visitor, recognition
All you exchange with them.  But just as here
Each time, the incidental changes jar
More for the continuity they ruffle
Than for themselves, so something, through the hungry
Shiftings of place and love, through all the paced
Predictability of change you live
For fear and comfort in, something still holds
As constant, inaccessible and true
As this impacted village, drawing out
Its own slow health at the cramped heart of you.
Come Sunday evening London will claim you back.
But here alone can you rest from the need that drives you
Away from here, and here alone, surrendered
Gracelessly to the safe siege of your family
And their known love, can you run upstairs in the dark.