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

'Queen Victoria is dead', Marisa informs me,
‘your regina madre. I saw on our television’.
‘Her name was Elizabeth’. ‘No, that is your Queen’.
On Lipari, Victoria has just died.

Marisa’s Canneto apartment has stereo-equipment,
many books, an exercise-bike, an impeccable kitchen.
But she eats every evening, it is expected,
round at her parents’. If she does not, there are questions.
‘My mother, in her time, until she was in her twenties
could not go out unchaperoned’.
Things change. But when Marisa worked in Messina
and might, on occasion, sip wine at the Bar Progressivo,
‘People spread hurtful gossip back here round the island’.
Where Victoria’s passing is somewhat belated.

Marisa has travelled: ‘In England, to London and Cambridge.
To Paris. New York’. And the northern Italian cities.
‘In those places I feel I have freedom.
I hate the Aeolians’. She means not her islands
(When I’m away, I miss most the light’)
but, ‘Everyone here knows everyone. Only, they don’t.
I could sometimes napalm Canneto, leave just its buildings’.

Among which this morning up a stepped alley towards me
hobbled a crone in black with shopping; she turned
to unlock a blistering door, beyond her a gap
to seafront, bared flesh and parked cars. A different world.
She’ll have done her bit. In her time.
Had many children. (Did she fret about freedom?)

Nowadays, in the north, in Milan or Ferrara,
the bars are thronged every night with frazzled career women
on the lookout for men. As lifestyle accessories,
not to start families. Even those who are married
neglect to have children. The birth rate has plummeted:
project from present statistics, and soon Italians
will be extinct, bequeathing great art to the planet.
‘Have the third child!’ the bishops are thundering.
But even a first, so demanding these days, cramps fulfilment.

‘Oh, Marisa’, her mother can say, ‘yes, she has a boy friend,
a lawyer, no, up in Milano, very respectable’.
Though scarcely a ‘boy’. And she is no more a ragazza.
She likes, she affirms, to be much on her own.
Playing Jane Austen tapes to improve her English.
‘And my painting’. She darts up the spiral of stairs,
brings down an armful. Some copies of modernish masters
and in primitive style, white on bright blue,
seagulls exploding to freedom in every direction.