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

I was through like a monkey, whistled out by that tramp freedom.
You stuck with what you knew.
But he, faithful in-between, was caught
in the shout that cracked the Wall, was buried
under falling slabs, catacombed,
as celebrations carnivalled around him.

We sat on opposite sides of his white hospital bed.
He was pale, bruised, his eyes enormous, full
of illumination and hurt, alternating, as he looked
at you, at me, back and forth, silent.

You got on with your life: replaced, not breaking step,
the gone - including me, airbrushed out,
the new man collaged in ( your Stalin side );
but, staying put, your life enriched, more ample
as you took what fitted from the new,
kept true the principle that underlay the old -
I still admire you for that.

I got on with nine: white-knuckle ride
on freedom’s flume, free to fail ( I did plenty
of that ); an interlude of recreated hone;
I found my way, at last, back, to where I’d been
before I leapt the Wall to you -
a living for nothing but the small vices
and virtues of a life lived by the lights of what I love.

And he, as adolescence’ switchback rattled him
through change, has stayed, unflagging go-between,
loyal to what was, and to what’s left,
has made a life with you, a life with me,
and his own life - a mystery - at a place of his own.

But I’m sure, as he’s crossed and recrossed first a ruin,
then a thing quite gone, that sometimes still he flinches,
feels the coming down that made our freedom,
remembers how it feels to have his world fall in;
wishing it not so, but powerless.

And so tonight, as celebration torches flame
a path of lights where once there was the Wall,
I wish for him the fire, the flame, to weave
the line while stamping hard the ground
and pick the final torch and lifting high
go forward in his own light - to come into his own.