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

Gigantic iron hawk
coal-feathered like a crow,
tar-coated cave bird,
werewolf, wodwo,
 
you’ve flown away now,
where have you flown to?

was how this poem began
before the shade of a voice
fell on my hand.
I was going to invoke
a many-sided Hughes and refer
to his poems and Sylvia’s;
it was to be called ‘Totem’

when I felt that faint weight
of exhaled disapproval. Was it
disappointment?
No shadow from a shaman-flight,
no demonic revelation;
just a sad discolouring of the air,
an indefinable pressure.

‘Please don’t imagine I have
flown anywhere,’
said the silence like a
voice in deep water.
‘The underworld was always a metaphor,
the life after life in which poets
are remade by their interpreters.

I’m better off here with
Sylvia and Otto, Coleridge and Ovid.
Nothing can hurt us;
we’re immune to our reputations.
As for you and the others –
you’d best be getting on
with getting on.

Keep marching, keep trudging
out of the trench and stench of one century
over the wire into another.
The millennium? You’re still
in the realm of blood and its thirsty ways,
so keep your head down.
Try to preserve the cave birds
at the bottom of your kit
and Prospero’s magic in your hip flask.

Don’t sell yourself or your poems
for a mess of verbiage. Oh yes,
and warn those agribusiness bastards
against abusing the Goddess.
Once riled, she tends to avenge herself
without discriminating between
lovers and rapists.
Take special care of her fish.
Take special care of her thrushes.

And don’t tell me who I was!
I’m the dream of a boy
who became a man and a lover
only by doing violence to violence.
I killed the fox
that brought me poetry
smoking from the gun.
After that midnight encounter
  
I set out for... where I am.
Death was my leader, tormentor,
wife, adversary, friend.
And still I’m, like herself,
an invention of my own imagination.
You’ll find me in all my books.
So, please Anne, no more poems about me,
grateful as I am for the compliment.
I had the last word first, remember.
I’m going to keep things like this.’