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5 December 2018

Armistice

A new poem by Helen Mort

By Helen Mort

On the eleventh day
of the eleventh month
I climbed towards Tunnel Mountain.

The snow was the colour
of a clock face, the lodgepole pines
were minute hands – I didn’t need the time.

I ignored all paths
and took the closed-off winter road,
walked down the vanished middle, my heart

a ticking engine in my chest
the dipped beam of my stare
but when I heard the silence deepen

on the hour, my body was no machine.
I stopped. The cold was graspable.
I reached out, held it gently by the hand

and stood to face the Rockies
in their regimented lines, the sentry skyline
and the bugle-calls of birds.

I sang happy birthday
to your ghost, sang across the continents
to Birmingham, my bad voice

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calling out to you, all
that was yours, the war you hardly mentioned,
the buried naval uniform,

the year your pulse failed
and my grandma called a truce,
crossing the miles to speak to you again.

I stood for two minutes,
two hours and when I turned
the snow was falling like dull rain

and though I could not cry
my nose was bleeding
from the sudden height,

the dry and unfamiliar air.
I watched a petal hit the ground
a crimson flower, opening.

Helen Mort is the author of Division Street and No Map Could Show Them. “Armistice” appears in Armistice: A Laureate’s Choice of Poems of War and Peace, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber).

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This article appears in the 08 Dec 2020 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas special