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

My grandmother had a grandiose, furious
passion for oranges: a cold
winter desire more
than a craving, more like
a statement. Winters
danced to the fragrance
of her oranges. We had
a south-facing, big-windowed
kitchen filled with navel oranges,
blood oranges for Christmas; we had
candied orange slices, breakfast
orange juice, marmalade, lunchbox oranges,
orange rind in our tea and orange cake.
There were orange peels left on the table
and pots on sills with things trying to grow
from orange seeds. We had tangerines, too
and knew what kumquats were
before anyone at school.
We had: “The Love of Three Oranges”,
“In a Persian Market”, the Orange Bowl,
the Cotton Bowl and the Rose Bowl Parade.
Seville, The Queen of Sheba, Babylon,
Constantinople and the shores of Tripoli
got scrambled in my mind
with the shipping and
enjoyment
of oranges. (I learned
about Hungary: Communism
was a new, scary word, sounding like
cold steel, and Russia
was a blizzardy place, all gray and white.)
In the back of the Oldsmobile,
my brother and I drew our own
wavering lines of demarcation all
the way downtown to The Orange Car,
which stood on its tracks just off North
                                                        Prince
between Walnut and Lemon.
Inside, our grandmother’s shipment
waited in cold darkness
that smelled of Florida’s groves.

Inside, there was a man
and his sister, (was her name Henrietta?)
with dark red hair, frizzing out
from under a dirty bandanna,
missing teeth and ugly
fingernails, peeling an orange or
lifting crates, stoking
the frail coal fire,
her hand scooping down to push
an orange segment
into my mouth; the juice
hurt my teeth and I wondered if
Henrietta and her brother
huddled in their boxcar
the whole way from Florida
like hobos. Did they
live there at night? In summer
the Orange Car disappeared.

This overcast winter
pushes me again towards oranges.
At market I see them in pyramids. I buy
too many bagfuls, get dizzy from seeing
orange-colored things, like carrots or
nasturtiums
pressed into bags of lettuce.
One market day I even find
small blood oranges.
Winter is full of these daily instances of
                                                    orange:
a man peeling an orange quietly
for a child on the sidewalk; the color
of our thumbs a long while after
peeling our own oranges; a bus
smelling of tangerines having just been eaten.
Winter
lingers when it shouldn’t.
Even though an orange
is something good and solid to hold onto,
I want spring
and that other aggressive color--
the yellow of daffodils, not firm and
long-lasting
like oranges
but I want oranges to be over
for this year. People should be
hacking around in their
hard-crusted gardens, planting.

I need spring and seasons,
all the seasons, even
the dying down of gardens. Then
I’ll give in to winter
and reach for
the dark cold fragrance of oranges.