Poetry 5 December 2018 Armistice A new poem by Helen Mort Creative Commons Sign UpGet the New Statesman\'s Morning Call email. Sign-up 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 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). › The best children’s books to buy this Christmas This article appears in the 05 December 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas special