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

After forty years of forgetting why
              in a strange land
you were proud of your own country,
              I have returned,
not as a visitor to verify your claims
      but to share in the memory
of those who kept you company -
              the men you worked with,
the streets that echoed with their names.

It was not then as now, where flocks of sheep
              spill down the hills
like sea-foam spread by waves that break
              and then recede.
They are dispersed, re-formed, made fleece again
      as if to mock the constant pull
of death's dull bell. Your valleys bred
              a harsher life
of narrow hopes and colder rain.

It was a world of darkness, coal and sweat
              where winter-shifts
deprived you of a whole day's light.
              Often you'd say
'there's not a place on earth where blood
              has never fed the roots
of grass or stained the helpless rocks
              for someone's gain.'
And yet, deep down, this place for you was good.

So now I come to raise those buried years
              and all the men
who were your heroes, either in life
              or in the books
you read each night by candlelight -
      Nietzsche, Spinoza and Tom Paine,
and those who vanished from an age
              whose words were deeds.
believing fervently their cause was right.

I think of how your longing would be healed
              now by this land -
the bracken turning and the trees
              clutching their tithes
for Michaelmas. See how the proud
      hawk stays poised in the air
as if it were a star hung between clouds,
              how sheep now pile
like wind-drift by a wall time cannot break.

These are the moments you would come to know,
              your work-days done.
I see you on the bwlch, your pit-prop back
              shedding the weight
of forty years spent in the dark until
      your eyes flinched at the sun.
Now all those scars are gone, your limbs
              at last unchained,
and you become a man again on your own hill.