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

Nightly, I try to give myself to the bed
and so deserve its gift of sleep
gift for gift
in the chain of reciprocity.
But nightly, my neck strains upwards
shoulders tighten, and I know
I’m heading for the ceiling,
the roof, the sky even.
Places that won’t have me
that bear me down again
into my own clenched body
with its mocking mind that says
You! You cannot give!

How many women…?

In the children’s cartoon, Wilma labours with the jar
of pickled peppers, but the lid won’t give. ‘That man,
that Fred’ she whispers, ‘cranks them down
so hard, they won’t come open.’
‘Do you have the same trouble with the car hand-brake’
asks her friend, ‘after he’s driven?’
How many curses, whispered, by Mrs Flintstone to her friends?

‘I’m having funny dreams’ my mother said.
‘I dreamed I stamped on the radio
and because it wasn’t dead
I stamped on it again.
Seven days have gone
I don’t know where.
When I started looking for the thing
your father said I’d smashed it.
When I was awake mind you.
I’ve not dreamed for years, and now
I don’t know what’s dream
and what’s not.’

The droning radio, the noise around her feet
as well as the kids, because he,
the proper little pronoun, has to have
his news, his thought for the day.
How many wars between women
and their men’s machines?

Sometimes a finger nail
scratching in my brain:
He does this, he sits there,
his old clothes, his cardigan,
his thoughts, that must be told
importantly, on the phone,
to this idiot and that,
and why doesn’t he
sit with me?

At work, a woman
sweats in the xerox room
making copies for her class.
When it overshoots itself
and she hears the long, mindless
patient mangling of paper
inside, she turns and yells at me, next in the queue:
‘I don’t know. Men make these things
and then expect
us to make them work.’

The rage, the homicidal rage
that does not restore
but has me sitting on the margins,
the harpy, the crone,
barred from the halls of Olympus,
the heavenly football game.

Rage that can wake a man up
from a heavy sleep.
‘What? What’s going on?’
‘Nothing, darling. Go back to sleep.’
And he does.

Once, I watched Strindberg’s Dance of Death
with a woman who did not catch her breath
as I did, at what the man and woman
did for one another’s torment.

‘Why did you watch without blinking, Margaret?’
‘Because this is how it is. This is it.
I know it from my mother and my father.’

Strindberg, unnoticed thirteenth child,
who will get his mother back (material creature, gross)
for what she never gave him -
Spends his time in alchemy
trying for gold from dross.
Yet who does not in some part join with him
when he humiliates Miss Julie,
snuffs her out for her high-and-mightiness
about her lovely body -

Kills her off for giving it at last,
the flesh he hates her for withholding?
Who doesn’t join him for what he did
to all our mothers on that night?
Treading them down into the dirt.

I am sitting in a garden
corner-crept by wildflowers.
Cowslips, caraway, scabious.
How near the edge am I, are we?

A bumblebee dozes in the burnt orchid,
pulling down its stalk.
I bend over its lobes, its dots,
its astonishing red hood,
the head it holds
as if we had all the time
to hold and pick and choose
instead of these sharp
shaved minutes,
these nows.