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

LUDLOW was a child
with less than twenty-twenty vision
who wore suspenders with his trousers,
and parted his hair to the left
to disguise his cowlick.

His eye glasses made his head look too small.

He lived with his widowed mother
who was afflicted with a nervous twitch
in a small, sparsely furnished cottage.

Ludlow was not a popular child
because he always achieved the highest grades
among his classmates.

He was often used as an example to the class
by his teacher, Miss Sheen.

When the other boys invited him to play ball
they only wanted him to hold their jackets
and keep score.

Sometimes they teased him,
“Four-eyes, four-eyes, Professor Ludlow
                                                     four-eyes..”

Ludlow’s mother encouraged him to study
but he was interested in drawing
though he told no one.

He would use his mother’s makeup pencils
to draw on pages of the telephone book
then tear them loose
and toss them in the fireplace.

On his tenth birthday.
Ludlow’s rich Aunt Lucretia
who was an old maid
and the subject of whispered gossip
gave him a painting set of water colors
and a fine horse-hair brush.

“Use your imagination,” she said.
“An artist must make the world more beautiful,
don’t just paint yourself into a corner.”

On an overcast day
Ludlow painted an orchard of pomegranate trees
on his bedroom wall.

The trees were heavy with rusty-red
                                                    pomegranates
that looked like weathered bells.

Along the bottom of the wall
he painted delicate white primroses
and thick green grass.

And in each tree he painted a smiling peacock
with colorful tail feathers spread against
a pale blue sky decorated with the sun,
the moon, and the stars.

There were no shadows in his paintings.

His mother stopped working,
sold his drawings for a modest profit
and lost her nervous twitch.

“My son is quite a painter,”
she would say.
“His name is Ludlow.”

Ludlow spent the rest of his life
sitting in front of the pomegranate orchard
on his bedroom wall,
drawing bluebirds in flight
and other fanciful things
on little scraps of paper.