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

They still speak of me and see me at the centre
        of the scene - with ropes, horses,
and my body with its parts still holding together
        - and filled with remorse
they prefer to see me weightless in the air.
        When they quote me, they’re full of fine words:
Here only you and I bear the guilt,
        you for subjugating my people,
I for attempting to free them.
        They even thrill with horror when they look up
the baroque phrasing of my sentence in the pages
        dedicated to my punishment: Eleven iron crowns
with sharp points to be placed
        on his head...
... Three red-hot iron stakes
        to pierce his brain
and appear through the mouth...
        What can be said about the suspicions
they hold, quite blamelessly,
        that the form of my torture
was meant as a metaphor for the nation’s guilt
        (doesn’t my unbreakable body
and the executioner who is trying to split it apart
        evoke Peru’s suicidal balance
and unattainable harmony?)
        They take refuge in myths and gifts of words
that fester in my mutilated limbs
        (causing me to suffer
even as they plan unachievable utopias):
        When his head, which they hid
along with his limbs, beneath the Governor’s Palace
        is found, once more
the times of Inkarri shall return.
        They are waiting for Areche
to place me on the rack once again,
        and instead of four horses,
the executioner’s well-trained hands
        to hack apart my bones at the joints
and make sense of what they say.
        It is useless to remind them of deaths before my own:
of my wife Micaela walking to the scaffold
        without once lowering her gaze (in spite of
her tongue being shredded, splashing blood
        on Matalinares’ fine clothes);
or that Tomasa Titu laughed at their knives;
        or that Oblitas, the black, shed two tears,
not for impending death
        but at the tedious farewells;
and that my children waited patiently
        as one by one they were cut to pieces.
The pain obliterated such erudite reflections:
        Did I denounce the king and his taxes?
Did I overestimate the subjective conditions
        and the nature of the masses during the rebellion?
Wasn’t I a mere novice on questions of strategy?
        Hut when all is said and done
everyone speaks generously
        of my Enlightenment virtues:
he was a noble muleteer who dressed
        in black velvet, rode a white horse
and could quote Garcilaso by heart
        and had the drama Ollantay performed
before going into battle.
        I knew public taste: my long hair
crowned by a three-cornered hat
        its brim circular and stiff - just the thing
to appeal to tourists in Cuzco.
        Arcane astrologers are always tempted
by fratricidal pairs, Geminis no doubt:
        Huascar v. Atahualpa,
Manco Inca v. Paullu,
        Tupac Amaru v. Pumacahua,
genealogists love to trace
        my blood-line
to the courts of Poland and Portugal.
        A strong ploy is to quote a verse
from a powerful poem by Romualdo
        (they’ll long to kill him but they’ll fail)
whenever they argue about the Indian stigma.
        There’s nothing more useful for any contingency
than another Prometheus,
        one who dies because he does not die.
If they know so much about my life and my achievements
        why don’t they come up with all my failures
then bury me and let me rest in death?