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

I catch a glimpse of them, obscurely, all these forefathers - how can I ever shake them off? I feel them all around me: they live and breathe in my blood. But most of them have no face, it s only my imagination that little by little supplies some of them with features, gives to their shadowy forms an outline, the play of expressions, the light of living eyes. All of them are nameless. Their lives must have been passed close to the earth, they must have been bound to the rhythm of the years. In the forests, on the plains in Kinnefjärding, Kakind, Vadsbo.

     The windows of the cottages, glinting behind the naked sullen branchwork of the apple-gardens, were patterned with icy filigrees, while the pine splints or rape-oil lamps flickered in the low rooms. Winters were often so steely blue, so glitteringly cold, that the wolves would penetrate Tiveden towards the villages further south. In blizzards the tenant farmers, those rural solitaries, would drive into the market town in their low sledges. Thawed out in the Christmas shopping, dazed by all the unfamiliar voices and lights round the table in the square, warmed by the crush of bodies and by swigs from pocket flasks, they would turn homeward to the muffled winter life of the farm: cottage and cattle-shed, threshing and carting, woodwork and slaughtering, repairing tools. Spring came, the sludge on the roads dried out, on the marshes the snipe started up his whinnying chorus again, rye and corn were sown. Evenings over the meadows and ploughed fields were filled with the harsh cry of the corncrake. The summer sun parched the grass round the church and made the catchflies blossom. And soon it was harvest again: the grain cut, the scraping of fiddles through steamy evenings. Autumn: the rustling V of cranes above aspens and fiery rowans.

     In their old age some of these men of the ploughland would be seized with an aching anxiety about God and the Devil, an obstinate terror of hell-fire and sulphur. Bible, psalmbook and homily would come out, the pages thumbed: stern words, lofty words, tremendous words on sin and retribution mumbled beneath the soot-blackened rafters. Space itself was full of rolling bells, if the surge of penitential and funereal psalms:

We dwellers in this world below
Are captives all of Death

     And death came: sometimes creeping slowly into a body wracked by rheumatic pains,on a fold-down bed; sometimes ambushing swiftly, as when a tallow dip is puffed out by a sudden draught.

(1956)