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

Odd how one’s attitude changes with the years.
Being a boarder meant that friends at school
were closer than the parents whom I never saw
except in the holidays. Home meant
a base, pocket money, parental kisses every night,
a sister to torment and we brothers fighting

until one of us was hurt or gave in. ‘Must you be fighting?’
Mum would say. But it seemed we must. And for years
even when grown up, we did - day time mostly - not at night
except for ragging in the dormitories with chaps at school
(wrestling, not punching).  Recently I wondered if this meant
we were instinctively finding something out.  I thought I saw

that all the straining, heaving was a sort of initiation;  saw
too that it provided a physical bonding.  Fighting
created something that words couldn’t, and meant
that friendships which survived lasted for years:
by no means a planned legacy of life at school.
Exclusively masculine, perhaps. Nowadays I wake in the night

and start living in the past till eventually night
ends and I try to analyse the scenes I saw
there - mostly a vivid enactment of hectic times at school
especially games. Sport was war, no less. Armies fighting
without actually killing. I loved squash - single combat. I had years
and years of that. I knew exactly what it meant

to be hardly able to move, and yet go on.  Challenge meant
so much. Hardly surprising that often in the night
I’m dreaming squash. The violence appeals. I gave up playing years
ago, but I’m there on court smashing a backhand, lofting a lob he never saw
which drops behind him. But somehow I never win, am always fighting
not to lose: before defeat I choose to wake. Are dreams the mind’s school

where we work over what’s gone wrong? The school
where failure, never success rules? and things we never meant
to happen, happen? I used to stop my own children fighting,
little armfuls of wriggle carted off to bed at night,
kicking and howling, getting a good slap. Only later I saw
that punishment for them proved punishment for me in later years.

I go on learning in that dream school that only opens at night;
where we may get glimpses of what is meant; where I think I saw
some of the ambiguities of fighting, looking back over the years.