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

After she’d gone, I began to ask
myself and the other ones there too
-some you could see, others were keeping
to the walls - about what she had said.

I could have taken her whole speech a-
part.  Or was it me her words broke up?
I felt my knees, feet, elbows leave me,
not in that order though, they just went

and flickered back, and then went again
off like mudslips, sudden and sodden
with me crying.  I was howling by
then of course, hiccuped ululations

though I doubt she heard me.  Her own words
ringing like sirens, like holy bells
- vindication of a sacred heart -
in the ears she carried off with her.

That was a new kind of martyrdom.
I was falling apart in there.  But
as luck would have it you missed all that,
breasts on a plate, the arrows, Romans

betting on our domestic lions.
Grief is a show.  But not a big one.
That’s what I realised, waking up
once to another morning of it,

a dawn with stretchmarks of grief on its
belly already.  I had to get
out of that room, that terrible team
The Incredible Losers.  I walked.

I talked the walk.  I told those others,
my dumb allies, where I was going.
Few responded.  They were afraid.  I
remember them now, crowding like ghosts

at the furthest reaches of firelight
that their eyes made something of.  I waved,
jaunty, though I felt myself drowning
in darkness - invisible still, remember,

my fingers glued like a toy bear’s, lids
dragging gravel over squint pupils,
thighs turned to jelly - it’s quite a climb
out of the cave into broad daylight

and when I reached the surface, blinking
and clearing the nocturnal phlegm, I
paused not so much for effect as to
effect a better start in the Land

of Visible Enfranchisement.  Drew
powerful breath.  Began then to move
slow as a steam motored thing at first
then, learning it, with increasing grace,

a gathering sensation of what
was getting to be special about
this whole affair already.  I grew
hair and lashes, smell, colour and sound

in that first week, but stuck a while on
touch. That took some patience. Then it came.
And came and came, the cold scream of ice,
the hum of rock, wood pliant as skin

the world bringing me back my shed limbs
onery,  stiff, but prickly with life -
like the intuition that got me
to her door at last.  I thought I saw-

how it was now in the land of the
living.  Thought I knew the ropes.  So fell,
like you would have predicted, right off
the map.  Since I was her disappeared

my appearance was dis-obit,
was disobedience.  Forbidden
fruit.  I hung on a while in that fork
not getting it, till she called me back,

told me Go get stuffed.  I baked all right
in the fire of that.  Remembered those
wall-seekers. This was what scared them!  I
thought about the tomb I’d waited in,

that place of terminations, stations
without comforts, a clearing house for
filial failure.  I can’t go on
I can’t go on, I’ll go on.  And I

began to walk again, into the
broad view and all that it promises,
green and gilt and full of trees under
none of which I saw my mother sit.