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

How splendid these flares are that light up the night
They climb up onto their own peak and then lean over to
        have a good look
They’re dancing ladies the looks they cast are their eyes
        arms and hearts

I recognized your smile and your vivacity

They’re also the daily apotheosis of every one of my
     Berenices whose heads of hair have turned into comets
These gilded and glittering dancers belong to all times and all                                                                                               races
They give birth abruptly to children who have no time to do
      anything but die

How fine all these flares are
But it would be finer if there were still more flares
If there were millions of them their meaning complete and
     related like the letters of a book
All the same it’s as fine as if life itself were to emerge from the                                                                                            dying

But it would be finer still if there were still more flares
Yet I see them as a beauty who flaunts herself then disappears
I seem to be at a great feast all lit up like the day
The earth is treating herself to a banquet
She is hungry and she opens her long pale mouths
The earth is hungry and she’s feasting like Balthasar the cannibal

Who would have guessed we could go so far down the road of
     anthropophagy
Or that it could take so much fire to roast a human body
That’s why the air has a slightly empyreumatic taste that really isn’t
     unpleasant by God
But the feast would be finer still if the sky were feasting along the                                                                                             earth
All the sky ever swallows is souls
Which is a way of not eating at all
And it’s happy just to juggle with many-coloured lights

But I and all my company have flowed the length of the long
    communication trenches and into the sweetness of this war
A few cries of flame keep announcing my presence
I have hollowed out the bed I flow down branching
     into a thousand little streams that run everywhere
I am in the trench nearest the enemy and at the same time I
     am everywhere or rather I am beginning to be everywhere
I am beginning something that belongs to centuries to come
And that will take longer to make real than the fable of Icarus                                                                                      the airman

I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire
Who was in the war and knew how to be everywhere
In the lucky towns in the rear
In all the rest of the universe
In those who die fighting their way through barbed wire
In women in cannon in horses
At the zenith the nadir the four points of the compass
And in the unique ardour of this eve of battle

And doubtless it would be finer still
If I could imagine that all of these things in which I am
      everywhere
Could enter me too
But in that respect there’s nothing doing
For I may be everywhere now but inside me there’s
      still only me