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

I am a stranger
to this northern summer,
its waves of aqueous green,
alien shoals of birdsong,
ambiguous scents.

Tonight there is a sea-turtle
gasping in the bath.
Outside, the stamp, jingle
of a waiting cab horse;
guttural shouts from a drunk sailor
off one of the steepling clipper ships
furled hull to hull in dock.
Beside me in the bed,
my husband mutters strangely.
What does a man dream
who has married a Zanzibar princess
and sailed her home to Hamburg?

And what does our domed turtle dream?
Plucked mid-ocean from her star-mapped sea;
penned on a slanting deck, while each night
ever more alien constellations
unrolled before her beaked gaze.
Until one day the deck settled, stilled,
and she was knocked down, dockside,
to be tomorrow’s first fruits,
at our first (da’awat asha’a),
what I must learn to call Festessen, “dinner party”.

Tonight my turtle fins feebly, dreams with me
of the same hot sands, harsh light,
the vanilla-scented crack of bursting pods,
fragrance of cloves far out to sea
beaconing beachward.

Tomorrow I must close her nostrils
with my stark “yes”: Mach’ das; “do it!”
On our warm island, wreathed in spice and subterfuge,
there was no need for language
when my husband came to me;
no veil between us when I breathed yes
to his urgent body, yes to his love.
And he is a good and simple man. My Mann.
But beyond his caring arms,
the coldness of his distant friends,
his catechising God.
And all I bring,
my shivering, unveiled “yes”.

Soon that will be “yes” to (al maut); Tod;
my daughter-turtle’s death. Freeing
her homing breath to wheel with the stars
back across sweet waters
to remembered sand.
While I stay grounded here,
in the dry channels of my mind.
And dusty by me on a mantel shelf,
a domed shell, emptied
of all but lamentation.