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

On Easter Sunday, watched over by its
round towers, those postmarks on a package from
a sterile world that Time returns ‘Not Known’,
we stand, a family of four - as if
expecting the millennium, counting down
Apollo XIII, or allowing news
about that bowel cancer operation
to sink in - and watch for yellow plastic ducks.
This way we celebrate the resurrection,
at Nunney, leaning on the bridge, to see
them host from post office and pottery
to nature sanctuary and church.  Nun’s Island.
Wild garlic at the stream edge.  Celandine
and daffodils that turn to the first yellow
competitors, with a cheer.  We check numbers,
who once bought twenty tickets for the moon,
but our telemetry today is solely
these yellow plastic ducks, the ones there stuck
on that weir, the ones here drifting into weed,
and those that somehow make a full U-turn.
While one fights anaesthesia, swims through drugs,
pushes against an ill wind, and endures
the feel of punters smiling anxiously,
the joker with the megaphone and clipboard
is shouting out results, but we don’t care.
We lean happily on the bridge (but not
too far, kids), watch the yellow plastic ducks
all upside down and numbered dribble by,
endangering the healthy native mallards
before them, outflanking them, confusing them,
as there in Bath Infirmary a life
drifts on with a thousand others, downstream
through visiting hour into the shady combe
of waste disposal, closed mill, lost race, on
benignly, yellow plastic ducks scooped up
by someone with a net beyond the finish.