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

I’m 6 years old and home from school for lunch. It’s the day the fish man comes. My father doesn’t eat fish so we have it for lunch. He is a vegetarian. We are sort of vegetarian but we sometimes eat ham. When we get food parcels from Switzerland we eat salami. My father eats it too.

My mother puts the fish on the table and there’s a knock at the door. I go with her to open it and there, at the bottom of the steps, is an old lady. It’s little Miss Lumley from the bungalow at the bottom of the hill. She looks up at my mother. ‘Gandhi’s dead. He’s been shot.’ She’s a bit breathless.
‘You’ve come all this way up the hill’, says my mother.
‘There’s no-one else I can tell.’

                                                  footprints
                                           among bird tracks
                                           snowflakes drifting

My mother closes the door and I watch through the window as little Miss Lumley goes carefully down the path. All the mothers wear headscarves, except for best but little Miss Lumley has a hat.

Forty years later I stand before the Gandhi Memorial at Raj Ghat in Delhi. Loud music. Notices in an unfamiliar script. Across brown lawns a queue of pilgrims. A white fence surrounds the spot where Gandhi fell. Following the others I stoop to collect marigolds from a pile and strew them on the black marble shrine. An eternal flame burns in a copper basin.

                                              smell of heat
                                   and withered flowers a tear
                                           drops in the dust