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

1.
On the train; bubbles
cloud the glass top, then
the mind, as we're
taken away. As the
sun drops, the citrus sunset
goes grey as the tunnel swallows it.
The end’s like a virus
that waits and then
explodes into diagonals and
a foreign greyness. Across the city
the night journey and promise of dawn.

2.
Love made the universe
to be loved, for more love
and when love was young, after
it shouted out from
the burst of first solid light
and it filled the empty spaces
where suddenly there was space
and the light and the energy
danced on the water,
danced through the light and the dark,
danced to such a frenzy of combination
that they diffused and filled the universe
with a clayey matter;
love was still young when it made this place.
The hillside there still speaks
of those hurrying thin-fleshed fingers
fingerprinted still by
conifer contours in the scree,
the clumsy, ragged ridge that he left
                                                     unfinished,
in a flurry of youth, to make the next one,
smoother, higher, its peak
a marvel of sculpted granite,
unreachable over the swathes
of loose dry rock
his palm scattered there. He made man here
to love, like him
and man loved and made a mirror
of the hills, in the church,
and the church, in the town,
and the light still dances
on the river here
and on the old stone wall
and in the little boy’s laugh.
He’s on the balcony, scared
of the festival last night fireworks,
the gunpowder corkpops and the champagne
                                                                   smells,
bats in the luminous leaping air
and echoes from hills and stone walls
and the tolling bell at twelve
and the joyful, drunken diversity in the wind;
but he’s standing with his arms
and his hands in his Mummy’s hands
and his smile is God’s smile.
He’s told to come in so he leans forward,
lurches with a rush to the edge
so far, he thinks, from her, and, fingers
round the rails, he laughs loud
at the random love of people.

3.
The river that rises from dry rock
beneath the birch-tooth on the ridge
we see now with sunlight in the morning
after the big bat in the night
that swept down to hold us to the fields in
                                                             sleep;
the river’s yours to claim, to name
where, young and clear and liquid-laughing,
where, in the morning,
the light and the energy
still dance on the water
in the pools of fishes’ whispers,
in running rapids
and the deep-walled channel
clean through the roots and the willow leaves;
it’s yours from the pineroots
and the winter snowhoard,
the mouth of frost and the green
hands of snowmelt spring,
tobacco leaves and the stone belltower
where six hundred year old stonework
is still modern and the men
in the street side cafés seem older;
you lose her as a daughter
to the Spanish rivers,
the plains and dry deserts,
the grand sierra and the dusty cities,
the foamy agony of a river’s death, and
then the silence of the ocean. But
the simple birth is yours
and the dancing on the water
and the first steps in the foaming
lovely sunlight of the morning.

4.
The last stagger
reels, a rope-end in the wind
over the precipice
where we re swooped by eagle talons
to the summit, unknowing
sheep in a big landscape.
So close your eyes; the mountains are the sea.
It’s the anger of the pine trees
on the massive slopes, the strands
of birdcry shot through the breeze,
the heaving on the hills,
pyramid-Pyrenees in this
land-bottleneck between seas
as if the earth is rushing against the air,
last trial for the home-blown mariner.
It’s the solitary cowbell clang of
the one who wanders from the flock
and won’t be anchored,
whose neckburden always brings him home
from the eyrie where the eagles cry.
The pebble that tumbled off the hillside
moved a boulder like a church;
the stones by the stony river are like
seaspray waves blown of f the waveface,
storm debris on the high sea strand,
strange kelp on the open ocean.
Coming down the loose steep path
to still heat waves,
dirt tracks and homesteads
with chickens clawing in the dust
the past is suddenly with us
as only the past can be, memories here and
                                                                  now,
the present simply is, for now
and we’ve no more fear for the future.

5.
Wind under the church stone pillar
through mouths on the wooden eaves
from light under the open doorway, swinging
and speaking clearly through the belltower
where the sunlight from the water
dances with the life of wind,
echo still the stony prayers, and
the dawnstar fevered longing
of the brethren now long gone.
The wind’s the echo,
in the sunlight,
of the first wind,
the first moving
of time, of light,
power of being,
the first noise
in the first heaven
when the light
exploded outwards.
It still reverberates
strong, still speaks
through the old
church tower this morning.

6.
From the wings of eagles
to the peak is further
than the ravine lip to the riverbed,
the windowledge to the cobbles below.
Picture the freedom
through the leaping air,
the inevitable, indefinite, unalterable moment
where nothing can be done or thought;
it’s the dream soar off the mountain ridge,
hard air, passing snow
that speeds more and more, the known end
in pine trees that never comes, in dreams
which end in sunlight.
It’s so easy, in the evening,
the head knocks on the road, fisheyed
go the cobbles through ruddy blood darkness
but then only darkness.
That’s not it; not the green in your eyes
with their stormcloud ridges from the centre,
the agony before the wind on the peak,
not the star on the roof line,
not the twelve tolls of the old town bell
and dreams in the night.
I dreamt of flung windcircles
on the grassland, fed
between cloudbars where light
poured down rivers
over darkmouthed trees.

7.
Down in the trees
where houses rest by the rushing river
the breeze was cooling, a
welcome voice through dry grass
and the leaf shadow on the page.
Here,
where the peaks, flung upwards
are still leaping to try to grab the eagles
and the eagles spinningtop away,
where the trees have failed
to grasp the soil so there’s no soil left to
                                                        grasp,
it’s like the peak burst, seared
through the treetops
and hasn’t stopped.
Here there are eagles
and only eagles
and here the wind is real.
Those rushing clouds,
take a handful with a leap from the peak,
joy re-echoed distorts their moving. The wind
holds you to the upright earth
and the muscles in your legs,
the stretched fibres, burnt back,
bleeding hands and torn toes
dissolve, roll away and are no more.
The wind tears you clean
and makes you jump
when you couldn’t walk any more.