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

Do you have a choice in the journey when, under a full moon, you tend wolf? As you go along the paths, which are faint by any standards, you have a savage tongue between your teeth, while the vegetation around you might be construed as a jagged savannah.

There are pools here and there along the way, and these are luminous, and full of stagnant water. And your wild and hungry eyes are set on your destination - somewhere you have thought about long, long ago, when you were hunting with that nebulous pack in the forests of your mind and your mysterious birth.

And this sudden, ruined terrain appears to you. It is born of the dawn. And as you walk through the wasted landscape, you know you have been here before, yes, you know it was from this very place that you started, years before. And now again you hear a voice, with its strange chant or incantation, and you see it there, that vision, once again before you.

It is a vision of an egg, complete with the stones of your own consciousness, a snake, the hanged man, a wonderful field of human breasts growing from the ground, the mind, your own footsteps burning in snow, a spider, the mirror of an emperor, marble eagles stricken by lovingkindness, and a cathedral constructed from death and from steel.

And the last thing you see is a molten ruby river, down which you are drifting in a small canoe. And in the sky above, shining down on everything, is the full moon, in the light of which you are searching once again for the wild and nebulous pack you hunted with in the ruined forest of your birth, long, long ago.