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

The way from intense inward feelings to
greatness is through sacrifice               – Kassner

Seeing had been his strong point.
Stars would fall to their knees
from the force of his glancing upward.
Or he would kneel to scrutinise something
and the waft of his zeal
tired out some god, so that it
smiled at him in its sleep.

He would observe towers
until they shuddered:
building them up again, suddenly, all at once:
but often the evening landscape
laden heavy with day
ebbed to rest under his quiet surveillance.

Animals, grazing, would walk with trust
into his spacious beholding,
and captive lions looked straight at him
as into unbelievable freedom.
Birds flew through him unswerving
knowing his sensitivity.
Flowers reflected his gaze as clearly
as with children.

And the rumour that someone could really see
disturbed the least and hardly noticeable,
and excited women.

How long had he stared?
How long, inwardly deprived
beseeching from the depth of his eyes?

Perhaps while he sat, waiting in foreign surroundings
a hotel’s disinterested, alienated room
sullen around him, and in the evaded
looking-glass the room repeated
and later, from the bed of anguish
again:
aerial beings were in consultation,
inconceivably in discussion
about his impressionable heart –
his heart that could feel
even through his pain-choked body –
it was discussed and decreed
that his heart had no love

(and denied him further sacraments).

There’s a limit, you know, to objectivity.
And the world that is well-perceived
wants to blossom in love.

Outward-looking work is over,
now do work of the heart
on what is imaged within you,
the scenes you have captured,
that you have overpowered, but do not recognise now.
Behold, inner Man, your feminine self
distilled from a thousand natures,
the creature you only possessed before
and never yet loved.