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

Begin it the way she might:
the two women sat opposite each other
on the almost-empty train from London to the airport,
one watching the other read:
a book written by a man, about a woman
beaten by her husband.

From Heathrow to Covent Garden, I watch
her sudden smiles, caught breaths, deep frowns.
Someone looking at the two of us would see
well-tended middle age, not fusty (note
the jeans and haircuts),  light luggage, no wedding bands;
might, or might not, wonder about secrets.

The nearest bookstore doesn’t have it,
at least not in paper yet, so I buy instead the other one
I’ve wanted: about a woman walking through the door
of her last age, saying a suffering goodbye
to her body’s thirst for a man’s sweat on her soft chest,
the slam of that hidden door so loud I end up taking to my bed
(as my grandmother would have said) and afterward
sending a letter : thank you, 1’m frightened, here’s a poem.
In a week, a card with keepsake words: thank you,
good luck, 1 liked it, hand-written on the back.
on the front, a medieval portrait, 15th century: Lady in Yellow,
gold hair elaborately knotted, smile tiny,
her pale and fearless profile posing
against an opaque screen of blue, the colour of a bruise.

Surely this golden lady would never lie awake in agony, much less walk into doors, throw herself downstairs,
kick herself in her pregnant stomach. But I know better,
and once I finally read his book I knew:
so does this man, who knows that the most dangerous doors
are those that don’t exist, a man to fear
with a different kind of fear- a man who watches women,
seeing the secrets behind our screens, catching us being caught.