Dämmerung by Simon Armitage

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 16, 2014   Dämmerung   Simon Armitage

In later life I retired from poetry, ploughed the profits into a family restaurant in the town of Holzminden, in lower Saxony. It was small and traditional: dark wood panelling, deer antlers, linen tablecloths and red candles, one beer tap on the bar and a dish of the day, usually Bauernschnitzel. Weekends were busy, pensioners wanting the set meal, though year on year takings were falling. Some nights the old gang came in— Jackie, Max, Lavinia, Mike not looking at all himself, and I’d close the kitchen, hang up my striped apron, take a bottle of peach schnapps from the top shelf and say, “Mind if I join you?” “Are we dead yet?” someone would ask. Then with a plastic toothpick I’d draw blood from my little finger to prove we were still among the living. From the veranda we’d breathe new scents from the perfume distillery over the river, or watch the skyline for the nuclear twilight.            Copyright © 2014 by Simon Armitage. Used with permission of the author About This Poem   “I intend ‘Dämmerung’ to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste.  The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K.  I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.” —Simon Armitage   Simon Armitage is the author of Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 (Faber and Faber, 2014). He is a professor of poetry at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and lives in Yorkshire. Most Recent Book by Armitage   Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 (Faber and Faber, 2014) "Get Up, Please" by David Kirby "Ars Poetica?" by Czeslaw Milosz "Healthy Smiths" by Jason Bredle Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038