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

1.

Now Bapu sleeps, leaning his grizzled head,
the large ear soundless, upturned like a shell,

left-hand index laid against his temple,
other fingers curling down across the chin,

a spare hand
loosely abandoned on the midriff.

For the white folds of the clothing, white on white, no flash!
Count the crossed creases; use only natural light.

2.

Fasting, feverish,
head swathed in a towel,
he lies between sister and wife
who kneel at either side,
their hands firming the body.

And the spirit
risen like loaves
under the white cloth.

3.

In a still corner
between the window and the door,
such linen light.
They are weighing the Mahatma

He peers down at the scale
of his wasting away
as though in a mirror
he had caught sight
of someone else
grown curiously thin,
and wondered why.

They hang the weight
a little further in
along the bar.

It floats.

4.

It is not first in the words, this measure,
but in the waking life: as here
building a fence, admiring a calf,
blessing a black lamb.

Or coming out of the hut,
walking into the compound,
studying leprosy germs through a microscope.

At midnight, on the travelling train,
Give me the spinning-wheel, he says

Bapu, it is too late, you are tired,
you will exhaust yourself!

Do not worry about me.
This is my routine; I must do it.
Give me the wheel.

Neither first nor last in the words.

5.

Ambushed in chiaroscuro
he sits on the ground,
legs folded to one side,
writing in a notebook
poised on his bent knee.

His limbs have that arrested look
of the unruly child stopped short.
The lens has caught, like El Greco,
the rapt aversion of his face,
the swirl of his spirit-dance
in the flings of the white cloth,
the folded-in calves.

Everything is subject to revision.

Or stands there, incandescent in the doorway.

6.

Walking is the first poetry:
a whole life’s measure in the music of the hurrying feet
here under back-lit clouds, taking the daily walk on Juhu beach,
girls bright at each elbow.

Or under the marble rocks at Jubbulpore by the quarried pool
stepping with bowed back, a tambour of drawn threads
rosaried from the hand, in contre-jour.

And afterwards the washing of the feet.
Kasturba’s hands again, the old wife always beside
who knows about walking.
In her seventieth year, leading the satyagraha.

Resign yourself: allow her hands, like leaves,
the love-life of an old tree.

I am becoming a flowering walking-stick
in the hands of a god.

7.

Excuse me; it is the hour for evening prayer.
I must be there on time; allow me to leave.

There were three shots.
As it happened, he fell on me.
He called me his human walking-stick.

We sang his favourite hymn over the body,
cradling his head in my lap.

Later, laid out on a lawn,
three shoes, a clock, a dropped spittoon;
a letter-pad, a rope, a rosary.

Shadows of trees
on the blood-stained white sheet
the women hold up.

Remember: these are contact prints,
light-sensitive.
Keep it at 50 lux.