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

This country is not mine.
My country was a slower, smaller place
that's lost forever where there are no hills,
no bartons, nothing built with cob.
At fifty years an hour I'm easily confused
by traffic signs and foreign scenery.

Poppies wheeled leftwards
at a minor crossroads yesterday
and snagged the edge of sight,
making the young wheat ranked above them
appear to slip the other way.
But was that blurred displacement
of sliding plates of colour
part of the route I sought to drive?
At home I knew that sort of thing.

This language is not mine.
An acid Devon "tü" dissolved my infancy,
whilst "vor" was soft enough to mend a broken knee,
and I'd be cossetted with:
"Rabbun dyurr, yer's zummat vor thy tay".
It's all gone over now.  Having parked my visitor's car
that Barum back-streets were not built for
I might decode a phrase or two
exchanged by neighbour wives out marketing
but could not speak a word for any price.

Back here though
my tongue so wraps the learned forms and graces
you'd think I came from nowhere else.
Some days I almost think as much myself.

These people are not mine.
The island city, floating on her nest of streams,
is a lighthouse welcoming the world.
Saxons surround her, farming clay
but lacking wilderness,
and all too kind for comfort.
At home the handshake and the eyes were different,
still weighed with flint and viking fire,
and giving nothing that had not been earned.

Nothing to me, then, except memories,
frayed maps for non-existent lands,
and voices
fading in the corner of an ear.