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

     The fish-restaurant on the beach, simple, a shack built by ship -
wrecked people. Many turn away at the door, but not the gusts from the sea. A shadow stands in his reeking cabin frying two fish according to an old recipe from Atlantis, small explosions of garlic, oil running over the tomato slices, every bite saying that the ocean wishes us well, a humming from the deeps.

     She and I look into each other. Like climbing up the wild blossoming hillsides without feeling the least tiredness. We’re on the side of the animals, we’re welcome, we don’t get older. But over the years we’ve experienced so much together, we remember that, also times when we were good for nothing (as when we queued up to give blood to the flourishing giant - he’d ordered transfusions), things that would’ve separated us if they hadn’t brought us closer, and things we forgot together - but they have not forgotten us. They’ve become stones, dark ones and light ones, stones in a scattered mosaic. And now it happens: the bits fly together, the mosaic is visible. It’s waiting for us. It’s shining from the wall in our hotel room, a design both violent and tender, perhaps a face, we haven’t time to notice everything as we pull off our clothes...

     At dusk we go out. The cape’s enormous dark blue paw lies sprawled in the sea. We step into the human whirlpool, pushed around in a friendly way, soft controls, everyone chattering in that foreign language. ‘No man is an island.’ We become stronger through them, but also through ourselves, through that within us which the other can’t see, Which meets only itself. The innermost paradox, the garage flower, the ventilator to the good darkness. A drink that bubbles in empty glasses. A loudspeaker that sends out silence. A pathway that grows over again behind each step. A book that can be read only in the dark.