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

1
Practical men they were, those ancestors of mine.
Hard labour broke their backs, gnarled them,
twisted them, like old oaks, but could not stop them,
generation by generation, handing on our line.

Millers on Costa Beck and Farndale miners;
yeomen who worked in wind and rain their strips of field,
cut turf on Spaunton Moor with spade and sledge,
and went to the wall with the rest at Enclosure time.

The later landless stock made tables, chairs,
pitprops, chapel pews, coffins and cradles,
or worked as engineers down Cleveland mines.
Always the skilled hand conjoint with true eye.

My mother's menfolk were boatmen; navvies;
shipwrights and caulkers who built in Tyne's yards
sound ships their cousins sailed to Archangel
in seas which froze their eyeballs to their skulls.

The women had the knack too. Mothered great
families of children; they yet found time
to milk, stack turves, launch boats, sell fish, weave cloth;
kept the show on the road when men died young.

2
My father refused his inheritance,
couldn't drive a nail into a wall straight
or cut a blown bloom off his wife's roses;
but as a taxman could make figures talk.

Came war, this numeracy strangely took
him to sea in Mystery Ships, decoy
for those trigger-happy U-boat gunners
who blew the sea-lanes clear with shot and shell.

Three years, suffered his share of wind and rain,
saw more death in the sea than his forbears
down their mine. Its daily strain exhausted
his slender capital of thoughtfulness.

He took up bowls; liked cowboy books, dance tunes;
paid his ancestral dues by love of work,
saw beauty in figures, justice in tax.
And, a last sour jest, died mending a lock.