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

Cobwebs lace freezing fog to the cottage door, I brush them aside with a red-dyed fleece mop and set out for your battlefield. From which, eleven hundred years and more ago, outnumbered in a brave fight, you fled, beaten, only to fall into the foe’s hands later and be shot to death by those marauding men of the sea. Danes. Not true needle-eyed bowmen, but more used to flailing about them with axes. Needing so many duff arrows to finish the deed. Laughing at you.

Rushford Heath. You’d not know it now. In maps for today’s walkers, the three great old trackways you knew tangle among studs, barns, paddocks. Where does the grass of Peddars Way thin into the grass of Icknield Way? The forest mulch of Angles Way mingle with that of Peddars Way? To start out along these paths now we need a car park. A Volvo hatchback digs its wheels in where Boudicca stopped to have an axle fixed. A ‘Take your Litter Home’ sign making nonsense of the soothsayings of wayside witches.

In the brecks the patter-drip from leafage that still hangs on dankly, making the ink of my scribbled memoranda run. A cock pheasant stands guard at the corner of a field, a breastplate of copper in the mid-morning sun. Further in, another bird whirrs aloft, raising its alarm. A muntjak skitters away with white scut perked. The battlefield itself is all serried withering maize; I stand by what might be your command post, this circle of briar massing around a yew.

I hold my doe-skin gloves out to the sun; long wear has given their palms a mirror-like sheen. I wonder, would they have so dazzled Ivar the Boneless, if I’d held them up in his face, that he’d have called off his warriors and left the field? An easier heart thinking I could have warded you. And then a shoot from the briar catches my ankle, a warm feeling rises uncannily from the frosted undergrowth.

                                                   hoar-melt and rime-thaw -
                                                  on bramble thorns the warmth 
                                                  of a drop of blood