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

Your brothers, sisters, divorced parents and animals,
an aunt in Brazil, a cousin expert on the Italian Mafia –
the fact of it was, I fell in love with you all.
For punk hair, pregnancies, Pater and pubes
discussed with volubility at the breakfast table.
For the talent you all had of discovering indiscretions
like the clonk of a plastic toy from a bumper crisp bag,
of winkling truth out with flamboyancy and thoroughness,
writing it with a silver aerosol across the air. Later,
there would be someone with a dustpan and brush,
there would be kindness on wide trays dispensed
from the kitchen: doorsteps of sandwiches oozing Marmite
and peanut butter, mugs with indecent mottos all full
of steaming tea. Liked too the fact that your family car
wasn’t clean, but autographed with mud, full of theatre props
and Wellingtons, that your dog was called ‘dog’
and the plants in your garden had no label, no name,
that you had bedrooms on the ground floor, a living room
at the top, and your brother kept his python periodically
in the bath – frightening the girlfriends, the boyfriends
who turned up, with never a shortage of milk for breakfast.
That you made me feel I was as easy as you, as brilliant,
as funny, as shot through with laughter, that the windows
in my house were open like yours, glittering with light
and interesting laundry. Not surprising, I suppose,
that you returned the compliment, that you longed for
my family’s yards of clean table cloth, its careful breath
of politeness, its rooms of space; for the dozing Sunday silence
broken intermittently by the bark of a dog called Rover.