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

1. THE GIVEN GROUND

Mountain water coloured with mud
spills around uprooted trees
yellow water full of bones and gravel
drags seawards through bare fields.
Collapsing walls held by roots and branches
finally topple in a spray of soil
into the cloudy water
as gravel banks shift and reform.

From Fraga northwards the light slipped away
and the land soaked itself in darkness,
roads sparkling with truck lights.
The thin soil gave way to green
and the woods grew thicker by the passing mile.
A derelict barn, a ruined castle on the heights
as we entered rock outcrops, uncultivated slopes,
and the hoe gave way to the gun.

Windscreen still pulsing with passing lights
small towns glistened and were gone.
A strip of bare wall, a lit bar or auto shop
or a blazing garage on the outskirts
before the night seeped back in.
I tried to find my bearings on a map
but drifted back to sleep as your brother
followed his memory. I dreamt of England.

2. BLACK BULLS

I’m listening to American Music
sat at a Spanish typewriter
as rain pulses across the Monegros
and the Ebro, swollen with storm
throws trees and rocks at the desert
as it scours a snake through Aragon.

Throw a book in these waters
and it’ll be pulped and shredded
before it has reached the paper factory
a couple of kilometres downstream.
As the dawn light rises above the mountains
carreteras sparkle and writhe.

Any road out of Zaragoza will take you into dust
past a roadside motel with twenty trucks bathing in this light.
There are no signposts, just the gentle curves of the roads
between identical hills of scrub and rubble.
A black bull gently rusts to red
and I squint at black words fading from my pen.

3. SUEÑO

I didn’t marry you but I took your language for better or worse
and now I carry a heavy bag full of American slang, realism
and musical clichés that slow me down as I try to absorb meaning
from this romantic culture’s blood and stone surrealism.

I keep my heart well hidden under an English duvet of dollars
whilst here hopes get dashed like blood across marble steps.
Whitewashed and glaring like a noon-day village street
there are walls here I’ll never cross over.

Better men than I painted them on bloody afternoons
after their frail utopian ideals were sliced to the root by blunt
                                                                                   blades.
Burdened by an Oxford past of limestone, ermine and false
                                                                                          victories
I feel enlivened by the air of freedom from servility.

I run up the hill looking for the moment when the shutter falls,
looking for the wind, the cierzo, that can dry blood in an
                                                                                      instant.
It is curling through the hills, picking holes in liars tongues.
creeps through my sleeves and around my passionless gut.

One day like Cromwell I’ll go back to Oxford and circle it with
                                                                                 another noose
and lob words like cannon shot into the quadrangles and gardens.
Then we’ll be married on a High Street whitewashed and full of
                                                                                         geraniums
as the ghosts of the International Brigade march past singing.

4. BRIDGE OF STONE

Five years ago we slid across this bridge at dawn
after a long hot drive from Barcelona.
I kept waking up on the back seat to see factories
flaring orange against the black hills.
As we entered Zaragoza I saw the basilica lit up
by floodlights that caught the dust swirling in from the desert.

I woke with that dust in my teeth, sweating
whilst you lay there perfectly cool and calm.
We carry our countries in our blood, habits, instincts
that carry us back to the same places in our dreams.
Now I catch you sleeping again; winter, the Ebro rising,
I’m not sweating but still the air here tastes different.

Every winter for five years we have swung back across the bridge
circling your past through the sparkle of christmas lights.
Words have crept into my vocabulary as I struggle with Spanish
but I still get caught like an uprooted tree on the double r’s,
tongue snagged against the bridge supports whilst you sail away
floating on the native rhythm of your language as I submerge.

I stare at the back of another car doused with torrents of rain
as tail-lights burn in the wet roads and palm trees swirl.
I stare at the roads as they flood easily,
a summer’s dust and dirt clogging the drains.
When we met I was washed away on a torrent of affection.
Now we stand on the bridge five years on
wind catching dust, staring into a flood that moves beneath us.

5. PIGEON HOUSES
(Parque de Castillo Palomar)

As spring rain dripped from the pines
we sat and drew the remains of that Edinburgh dovecote
ruined from years of neglect, the laird long dead
and the estate he owned now a nature reserve
carving a green swathe through the council estates.
Joggers ghosted along the woodland path.

Vegetation so rich we slipped on the damp moss
as we clambered over the storm-wrecked pines
with hardly a care for the green around us.
Now we walk on this park’s threadbare grass
nurtured by municipal watering
and sit in a café built around a tree too precious to cut down.

Walking there today, a compressed spot of green in a yellow city
I saw a boy carrying a couple of birds in tiny cages stop,
and on the steps of another ruined castle, gently water them.
Too precious to be released they flashed in their gilt cages
as my thoughts spiralled back toward meadow and dovecotes
and a patch of grass, and my father scything an unkempt green.