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

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Seán Body

print this page

Ties

Your grandmother is anecdotes,
the crumbs of conversation
you feed on like Lazarus

hugging wounds and hunger.
This is a place of pilgrimage,
of intense listening, as if

the soil she has become
becomes her: a woman of standing,
proprietress of a boarding house

in Georgian Dublin, dying
of consumption in a Salford slum.
Your grandmother was a Lady.

The engrossed picture-goer who,
when the silent screen rained,
raised her umbrella. Laugh!

We split our sides! The bright
young country girl for whom
a city danced, twirled a green skirt.

Was it marriage brought her
here? The farm already spent
that was his suit. She’d not reveal.

Airs she gave herself! Voices-off,
like Chinese whispers, take you
no further than the blunt-fisted street,

the bruise of her, closed
as a bedroom. Gone to ground
in this anonymous spot

you now tidy with grand-daughterly
care, leave a prayer in the grass,
propped up like a leave-taking–

All there is: these tenuous ties;
her silence cupped like a hand
round the small wick of honour;

and a word, like a sigh of ocean,
Labasheeda, her place of first memory,
The Fairy Bed, a soft place of rain.

 

Page(s) 33-34

Back to top