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

We’re 51 and 44. our daughter’s not yet three--
on paper it amazes me; in my head we’re young
as new parents ought to be. But what if we’d met
when we were the “right” age for having babies?
Nixon’d just left office (we saw him on the big screen
only Saturday). We’d have met at a party
(though no one called them “parties” that was too
sorority/fraternity and “dating” too was out
and we were in. We’d have been
each in our preferred way FUBAR
(an acronym I’m not so sure was universal)
and we’d have strayed to a back bedroom
for what was then called a zipless fuck
and then wandered back into the light,
eyes squeezed nearly shut, never having
learned the other’s name.
Or maybe it would’ve been a long-term
romance--say, a month or two
which was the longest either you
or I managed or wanted in the free-love
get-it-while-you-can-halcyon-hallucination heyday
of our youth. (Though you were--ur--past thirty).
A few weeks later I discover I’m one of the one
percent for whom the pill doesn’t always work
and am told I’m to be a mother. Too embarrassed
to tell you (even if I could find out your name
and number from our host who’s my ex- ex-lover)
I have “it” taken care of very quickly very early
and then off we go to the rest of our lives:
to New York, Philadelphia, to east coast and to west.
to Australia and New Zealand, to Spain and Budapest.
Through canyons, over mountains, ‘cross oceans
and ‘cross seas, and into more seedy beds than we’d
care to count, strung out to the limits and back again.

Even when we both lived here in the same place,
all those years we weren’t ready
and we never met, though surely we passed
on the street once or stood in the same line
at K-Mart. You in art, me in English, finally we bumped
headlong into love and middle age together, slept and lived
together for years at a time, had our lovely daughter.