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

I’d like these syllables,
that with a hesitant schoolboy hand
I trace with difficulty,
to reach you on a dark day
of boredom – when noon
yields no other sound
than that of a melting eave,
and not a single conviction
survives the corrosive moment,
and the spotless white walls face us,
the horror of living rising in the throat.

Then you’re sure to remember
the companion of many hours spent
on brick-paved walkways
that cut, closely hugging the dips and inclines,
our dwarfish hills dressed
in the ragged lace of bare branches.
It will seem as if you’re no longer running
alone beneath the ruffled canopies
of olives, with abrupt stops and starts,
shrunk in an eye-blink to child-size.
Your memory will fill
with the trees we knew:
bearded palms and leafy cedars.
And your beloved medlars.

This is the memory I’d like to leave
in your life:
to be the loyal shadow that accompanies,
asking nothing for itself;
the image that emerges from the foxed print
of childhood recall, and creates a still moment
in the day’s turbulence.
And if at times an invisible power
has you in a web
of burning hours,
that you’re secretly taken by the hand.
Not by some angel of edifying lore,
but by your unobtrusive friend.
Oh briefly imagine
Keep listening. I want to reveal
the thread that joins our separate lives,
how even if you’re silent I can hear, almost,
the shadows and transparencies of your voice.
One day you told me of a childhood spent
amongst your hunting father’s
owls and dogs – and from then on I thought
you were in touch with the essence
of things, the root system
of life’s frondiferous plants.
So while your contemporaries
spent their days blithely
at play, or amongst the hour’s
anxieties, indolently,
with your few although unblemished
autumns, friend, you’d already
glimpsed the key
to the mystery which weaves us.

I, too, often in my rustic
Levantine adolescence
would climb quickly before dawn
to the rocky summit to see the first sun,
companions by my side
with sunburnt faces.
Silently balancing in our hands
ancient arquebuses,
we advanced in the darkness,
occasionally stopping
to measure with our fingers
the black gunpowder and the vetch
trampled at the base of canes.
I waited sunk in a bush
for the long ring
of wild doves
to rise from the smoking vales
of olive groves
and turn towards the summit
of the mountain –
now in shadow, now lit.
Slowly I aimed at the stranded grey
leader of the line, pulled the trigger;
in the blue the sharp report
was like breaking glass.
The struck bird veered, gave to the air
a few tufts of feathers, and came down
like a wind-blown piece of paper.
All around a mad beating of wings.
Then sudden silence.

And I discovered further in my early
days, observing
the hare killed in the low vines
or the rust-coloured squirrel that carries
its tail like a red torch
from pine to pine,
that those small scrubland creatures
sometimes carry for months
the minute lead shot
in healed wounds in their sides,
until a weightier bullet
brings them to earth for good.

Perhaps I digress; but only because
thoughts of myself and memories of you
trigger scenes of wounded animals;
because I cannot think
of our disparate lives
without visceral recall
of sensations that are primal
and of images that stand
before the difficulty
of living that’s now our lot.
Oh I understand and you sense it
too; more than the fancy
that kins us with wind and trees,
more than nostalgia for an azure sky
imprinted on our gaze;
what unites us is our old
shared presentiment:
of being wounded by a world
that’s obscurely maleficent.

We met as if coming together again
after long years of wandering,
the spool of time unwinding
for us an endless thread.
Side by side we walked without surprise,
without masks, with plain words.
I think of certain past times
when the return of light or end of day
so tormented me
I didn’t know with whom I’d ever share
my rich heaviness – yet all around
sensed the flowing of a benevolent power,
a bond of friendship unexpectedly emerge,
between myself and another.

I sense that in those moments
you were already by my side, are there still
though far away, in this guttering day
ending without apotheosis.
And that together we watch fade,
among the breakers and the dense mists,
the cliffs of the Cinque Terre
whipped by foaming wave-crests.