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

I - WHEN SHE DIED

When she died they found
The keys to her house
Locked in her hand
Her grey scarf framed her face
Wide at hairline
Tight like a strap at chin
A nuns's wimple
Her face simply
Contorted creased
Punctured deflated
Over the last few days

II - EXPERTS

“I cannot avoid the conclusion
That what helps us to survive
Stops us seeing.
What comforts us
Allows it to escape.”
“Words, for example,”
Says the poet.
Feeling smug and pleased
And small
Their voices obliterate her picture.

III - THAT TRICK

How do we do that trick
Where the words go
Like turning the sound off on tv?
But we do it in our heads
We don’t see ourselves do it
It drops out of view
Like a pencil slipping down the side of the settee
No one mentions it

The tv chattered on like an angry friend
“I don’t agree with the war,
I don’t say so, no one does.
They don’t even call it the war.
As if by mutual agreement
It’s “Kosovo”
We’re bombing civilians, but the parallel
Memory of the “Blitz” has collapsed like
The timbers of a bombed house.

The tv chattered on like a boring friend.
“Natter, natter, matter.” The tv sounded like a sewing machine.
I remember the children in Terazin continued to draw
Using scraps of paper, burnt sticks as pencils.
Their mothers continued to sew on machines powered by treadles.
That clamoured in frantic bursts then were silent.

IV

THE SAD POEM ABOUT WAR AGAIN

A grey scarf folded at an angle
Cut like a posh sandwich
- Ready for a picnic
Covers the side of her head
Leaving her face free for levity
An opportunity it misses.

V RETURNING HOME

   I could see the white walls of the inside of the cottage, dusted with pink and yellow by the waning sun. That was the first shock, no one else was there. No one moving in front of me cutting off my line of vision. Cutting off my sight. With all their colours and voices, black scarves with patterned lace edges. Cutting past my face as they get up to leave, or cross the kitchen to put the porridge pan on. That great heavy black thing, that ached my wrist, but i would not let on. And Milosh crawling on the floor under my feet, toys everywhere. Thomas shouting his order for food and getting as good back in return, before Nadia with all her energy would step up with an easy swing of her arm and place the pan on the stove. Soon the eggs would be frying.

                                                   I notice the walls in a way i have never seen them before, in all my years here. I see them blank and plain their surface white and even. Uninterrupted by pictures or ornaments. Now i see them. Before their surface was an invisible skin catching the echoes of voices. Now it’s like the hand that smoothed that plaster has smoothed across my life.

                                                   I have the courage now to look down, to where floor and wall meet. I saw this during their punching and kicking. Some of them i knew from the next village. But they acted just the same, like they didn’t know me. Not even as well as you know the family’s cow or dog. They struck me as if their fists hated the sight of me. To them i was ugly beyond my age, ugly as a diseased cow. I became scabby in their eyes. As if I’d grown a greasy skin like a fish. Only they could see it, I hadn’t changed. Their fists wrapped round my body and head like cattle whips. I couldn’t escape. “Good night, Grandma,” they said. And I thought it was my last night. I was no grandmother or mother to them. I’d become offal. No one knows why i didn’t die.

                                                   After there was nowhere to go. They knew the streets and houses they knew the peoples hearts. The village had become a heart and they were squeezing its veins. They knew before they came my son was not here. All the young men had gone a long time ago. They had come to frighten and kill us. To them there was no difference in the two things. Now i wish to murder them so it goes on.

                                                   As i move across the kitchen my skirt swings between my legs opening and closing, as if my legs ask the question that my lips cannot. Why do i feel like they’ve raped me, when they didn’t?

VI BEFORE THE WAR

                                                   I open the map of my home country, unfolding it panel by panel. The crisp new paper resists. It is awkward to hold like a large sunday paper. My arms are too short to control it and it spills out all over, like a waterfall.

                                                   Inside the memories i find; a precisely cut grey circle silver grey like metal. The absence of my mother, cut from life. A blue tie with white stars on it, the colour of the flag. My father’s tie he called it his “pony tail” as it tickled my eyes as he swung me up high over his head and onto his shoulders. He said i was like a sack of potatoes but he was smiling.

                                                   Then he carried me and we marched down the middle of the village street. He proudly greeted everyone, like he was a rich and important man. “Good morning, how are you? your family well?” He spoke to everyone, a thing he’d never do on weekdays. And he strode along like he carried a sack of gold on his shoulders. He expected everyone we met to smile back and admire him and they did, captured by his spell. It was as if the smiles bubbled up inside them and had to come flowing out of their eyes, like water from the village pump.

                             He only smiled when i was on his shoulders. I felt like the giant strongman who arrived with the circus. He could bend the thickest iron bars, ones as thick as my arm. Or like the ones on my grandfathers farm gate that were shaped like cockerels.

                             Dads boots clipped on the cobbles, making them ring like bells, and the church hells boomed like cannon. I forgot about school that was anchored oceans away in tomorrow. Walking down the street was like walking through a waterfall and splashing people with happiness as we passed. This was also sandwiched in the map.