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

1)  Wuthering Heights
in memoriam Jonah Porter

When those tumultuous passions could no longer be contained
There were three mounds covered with moss
With all that beneath them as though it had never been

And the wind sailing over
As though nothing could ever disturb anything
In a place so green.

We scattered your ash on a day full of sun -
All these years on
Is there a single speck of your heart that has not been removed by the rain,

Yet isn’t it, after all, we who depart
And you who remain?

2) Agnes Grey

Everything was true,
The spoilt children who wouldn’t take no for an answer,

The drunken lords and prick-teasing ladies,
The cultivated grounds, the vistas

Of unwithered acres you could have unfolded
Your freedom across if anyone had given you the map.

Everything was true,
Sundays in church in the family pew

The handsome curate catching your eye,
The dream, the possibility -

Everything was true
Except the happy ending.

So we can look down our noses at you,
Anne, you missed the beanfeast.

If you could just have held out another century or so
You could have been like us -

Happy ending after
Happy ending after
Happy ending.

3) Jane Eyre

Five thousand apiece, that was a good notion -
That meant you all had money, forever,

And could afford to sit sometimes
On lazy sunlit lawns, listening

To the faint hum of engines
Powering towards you from over the century’s rim

4) Interior at Haworth

Here Death smiles at the living, it can wait
For the great feast which gathers at its gate
A culture gone into peripheries;

Outside the wind saps the trees, unaware
Of the spoiled century queuing at the door
Past gravestones slouching, blackened by the rain
As though exhausted by the world of form
And anxious to return from whence they came.

Inside I cannot find you. There are things
That once belonged to you:
Impossibly small, your visiting dress

Stalled, vacated, caged in glass;
Shoes, smaller than impossible,
Pebble lenses, fragments of script,
Three portraits, one flattering,
One bad, one painted from a memory

They cannot touch your centre, but hold back
As though entirely shouldered off
By blazing whiteness burgeoning,
Filling centre frame.