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

A full round orange moon
is up on its elbows
looking through trees

like a baby just woken up
not sure where it is
drinking in space.

This was later,
three hundred and fifty miles on
from you in Devon

(buried or not – I didn’t know);
a whole day north
from me and Olwyn

having a fag in the garden
of Court Green, where
the head man of Faber

and The Times editor were
nodding together, and Carol
slipped out of a side door

in her wellies, making for
the veg (her hand in mine
a coin of ice),
  
and Mr and Mrs Seamus
came slowly out on the wet cobbles
for a breath of air.

It was all accidental,
harmonious, coincidental,
like my son Ben

landing on the edge of the aura
of Paul Muldoon
in the upstairs room

heaving with names;
like this big
unexpected moon

on the night of your funeral,
daring you not to lay down
the cloak of your life
 
while she climbs up
through a crown of leaves.
Outside there were policemen

in capes, as though dodged
out of a John Buchan novel,
a few halfhearted paparazzi

not knowing who was who.
What with a Moody & Sankey
organ dribbling notes into

the boxy, foursquare
Protestant silence,
the rain immediately after

scattering mourners
like minnows
before they could reform

and glide together
on a wave of grief,
the long haul uphill

to Cumbria in the outside lane,
dazed by speed
and immobility,

this gross physical ache,
the nameless faculty
of disbelief, as if

someone had put a No Entry
sign up on your name,
or wiped out an entire song,

I was in need
of illumination, and the moon
obliged, tilting my head up
  
to catch sight
of a second sight
paired with the dark.