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

I

All day the floodwaters rose, like exequies,
they were dragging up the muck and roaring yellow;
they carried off the praying stool, lectern and armchair.
I heard like a panic of bird-flight the racket
of the hailstones in the conservatory:
there was a sense of orphaned mischief in the sound,
of the sudden, open, blowing view –
one at a time the breakable hundred panes.

We lament our lost fathers, who leave the view clear,
who grow ever more untalkative though wise.
And here was a sound, of unfathered hail
and poetry’s canvas flapping on its ropes, flapping;
water rose from below... the Severn
up twenty foot, the Wye fifteen, with news
of sixty rivers on red flood alert, freak hailstones
the size of marbles, record rainfall and gales.

All day they rose and bulged, the waters of chaos,
trapping the ironmonger in the room upstairs,
the tiny boy rowing through the traffic-lights.
This was the day you died, when sandbags were piled high
and the floodwaters flexed and spread into ocean
as if confused, as if trying though blind
to find a level, pour like the displacement
of water after The Pequod, into the hole.

II

Between the sinking and the yellow swell,
so white against the water ebbing in
the swan is swimming through the Swan Hotel.

The great river, scorning sandbag and sill,
broke window glass and poured on in.
Between the sinking and the yellow swell,

between the elusive and the palpable,
against the cloudy Severn bulging in
the swan is swimming through the Swan Hotel.

It cuts the path lanky waiters will,
down the siding of rooms left floating in
between the sinking and the yellow swell.

Between the white, the very white and optical,
like pale gas against leaf-viridian
the swan is – swimming through the Swan Hotel

where the plunder lodges but does not keep still,
against the current, against the weir’s din,
between the sinking and the yellow swell
the swan is swimming through the Swan Hotel.

III

And how will the decks balance, how will the ark
stand up, without its drogue stone? Without
the brake that eases it through the depths,
holds it upright, parting the brilliant shoals?

How will the ark be steadied without the stone,
slow down, or pause? How will it be held
now the long spine is withdrawn although
the notches crave their mortices, nerves fly about?

How will it accommodate the tidal bulges
of the yellow century, distinguish between
the shoals and the swell of it pushing up
the topography of the new washed world?

How will it fare in the way ahead, trawling light,
without the bowed and lengthy beam
cut from a single tree? The drogue stone is off
and the hull of the ark, I swear, begins to spin.