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

Today she sits on a train with her friend.

Her mother talks on the phone
in a sunny kitchen with pink geraniums
and lemon mint on the windowsill.
She sits on a tall stool, swinging her leg.
The telephone cord is twisted over her foot,
her fingers engaged with the fabric
of her daughter’s skirt.  The sewing machine light
makes a circle of brightness, similar
to the end of the tunnel the train emerges from
as it breasts the cutting about ten miles from home.

The girls are as contrary as other teenagers,
as their mothers were, vulnerable as toddlers,
confident of their desirability, noteworthy
in their stretch jeans and tee shirts.  They giggle
as they push clean hair from their eyes
on a spurious trip to the buffet car.
Each spent the last of her allowance in town.
Some passengers notice them consciously,
smile at their brazen youth enviously,
return to newspapers, magazines, laptops.
He is only subconsciously aware, suffers
the splitting headache more
since he abandoned the medication he requires.
Somewhere very deep inside he thinks
those girls are laughing at him.  There is
a scornful quality in the way they turn aside,
discarding glances they worked to invite.
Her mother has put down the phone, noting
the time, unaware that she has only two hours,
thirty-four minutes of normal time left.
The boys will come home, hungry as locusts,
their heads full of swimming in the sea,
clambering onto rocks, sand drying into their skin.
Better than emptying desks, handing in textbooks,
standing bored in the dusty hall for final assembly.

The girls, back in their seats, indulge a secret
language of signs, contorting their faces in parody
of ridicule.  Spying familiar contours, they clutch
their possessions and race to the exit.
There is still time to change the course of their lives.
One has no future, the other’s will be blighted miserably.
There are so many threads in this tapestry,
so many consequences.  The boys can no longer
contemplate clock golf and swimming in the sea
at Talland Bay.  The geraniums and lemon mint
will wither, the skirt will never be completed.
The consequences of consequences:  the girl’s
impatience, the friend’s father, low on petrol,
delayed by a client, detours by the garage,
arrives ten minutes late.  The man without medication
turns right out of the station, sees the friends quarrelling,
stops near the foot of the short cut through the spinney,
spies the impatient girl.  It is a game in his head:
Dip, dip, dip .... If she goes straight on ....
He squeezes his eyes tight
feels the tremble of air
as she chooses the short cut.