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

As she looks at the lawn
threadbare as an old teddy,
and the cat rolling in diamonds
of dust, resentment blooms -
he’d promised not to work today.
He empties the teapot out
on sunlicked tomato plants,
thinks: too bloody hot to take
students round the Tower, cuts
sandwiches in silence.

All morning the children snap
and shred the few daisies
they find beneath the pear-tree.
In the weighty afternoon
she puts them, tear-smeared, to sleep
in a bedroom’s dim folds.
Down in the basement she begins
a watercolour of phlox
but leaves it, feeling she’s sealed
in a tightly screwed drum of heat.

At last the sun is smothered
by blankets of cloud; a gust
swings a door to, twitches
an unhooked curtain end.
Now school-uniform green,
the day is ripped by lightning,
crashed by trays of thunder.
The first drops splotch flagstones.
Then leaf-sweet rain falls
upon the sapless earth.

Fur ragged, the cat runs in.
When the sky unplugs she stares
as though spellbound by TV,
till a lapping makes her
go down steep stairs to a sea
floating wellington boots
and a chair that marks where
her drowned painting is. Words stick
in her throat but the children
crow: “Our own swimming pool.”

Wading up to her thighs
in the dark, winking tide
she rescues a bucket, beaches
the children in the kitchen,
begins baling out; finds
capless tubes of paint drifting
and tipsy bottles keeled on
bloated boxes whose sides
are about to collapse,
as she dips, heaves, pours away.

When he comes home with tiger-
lilies as an offering,
she weeps. Taking over,
he sweeps out silty water.
The stench of damp grows, will live
for weeks. At last she lies
in his body’s crook, stroked
by fingers light as petals,
immersed in a fleckgold
closeness she cannot fathom.