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

North Landing, Flamborough, on Halloween.
Yesterday this would have been noon
but we have slipped the clocks to winter overnight
and now we are an hour ahead of nature
or back in its embrace, depending on your point of view.
The shadows are not fooled. They jut massive
as ocean liners from the pointed edges of the cliffs.

I am walking off a mountain of chips and peas. Last day
of the season for the café. They are emptying the freezer
onto everyone's plate, but only one bottle of vinegar
for the whole place to share. No point in stocking up
after September. I have left you sketching
on a patch of marram grass as springy as a mattress,
tubes of acrylic and brushes rolling to the cliff edge in the wind.

I map my fantasy of living here. This perfect dog walk,
this perfect painter's light for you; peninsular, multiplied
to luminous by that elemental algebra of sky and sea.
The waves have honeycombed a standing stone and left it stranded
equidistant from two points of land. The path edge where I stand
has crumbled. If I lost my balance all that might save me
is a single rusted strand; barbed wire roping off infinity.

Back in the café the women are watching the clock.
In the hour or so since lunchtime they have stripped the walls
of maps and menus, started stacking chairs.
Out on this headland, which has cradled
a fishing village as long as anywhere in England,
they are getting ready to call it a day;
ready to close up for the year and the millennium.

Later, at Thornwick Bay I walk as far out as I dare
along the chalk and flint, steering a promontory
like the prow of a ship, out through the archway to
the sheer cliffs of Bempton; up and round
the gentle bulge of Filey Brigg, and on to Scarborough;
navigating this eastern coast along a timeline in the fading light
back up to Whitby Abbey, back to Lindisfarne.