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

Spring lets her cheating sweethearts roam
Leaf-lazy they fall like feathers of blue
Shaken off the cypress that shelters the bird of blue

A madonna has gathered eglantines at dawn
Tomorrow she’ll come for cloves hot and sweet
To line the nest of the doves she has sworn
To the pigeon, a night-time Paraclete

In the little lemon grove latecoming girls
Fell in love of the love we love tender
Their eyelids are faraway hamlets, little worlds
And among fragrant lemons their hearts are suspended

My friends have at last confessed their contempt
I drank the stars by the glassful
While I slept an angel exterminated
The lambs and shepherds of sad pastorals
False centurions brought vinegar
And tramps wounded by the purge were dancing
Stars of awakening, I knew none
The gas jets pissing blue flame in the moonlight
Undertakers tolling beermug bells
In the candlelight false collars fell
On great breakers of unkempt skirts
While masked babymakers from hell
Celebrated the births

It was an archipelago, this evening, our city
Women demanded love go down on bended knee
O river, river dark, it all comes back to me
The passing shadows weren’t ever pretty

Oh I’ve lost all self-pity
And I cannot express my torment of silence
All the words I had to say have turned into stars
An Icarus flaps his wings to reach each of my eyes

I am the sun-carrier and I burn in the centre of two nebulae
What have I done to intelligence’s theological beasts
The dead of yore
Have returned to adore
Me, and I
Who was hoping for the end of the world
Hear my own approaching instead, hissing
Like a hurricane

I had nerve enough to look back
The corpses of my spent days
Mark out the road I’ve taken and I mourn them
Some are rotting away in Italian churches
Or in little lemon groves that
Blossom and fruit
At the same time, any season
Other days have wept before going to meet their death in                                                                             some bar
Where wheels of burning flowers turned
In the eyes of a half-breed who invented poetry
And roses electric still open
In my memory’s garden

Oh forgive my ignorance
Forgive me for no longer knowing the ancient game of verse
I no longer know anything, I
Can only love
The flowers in my eyes turn back into flames, I meditate
Like the gods above
Benevolent towards the beings I haven’t created
But if the time should come
When shadow finally solid
Multiplied giving tangible shape
To the thousand facets of my love
Oh then I would
See that it was good and rejoice.

I observe the Sunday rest
And praise idleness
How to, how to narrow down
This subtler and subtler science
Imposed by the senses
One is like mountains like the sky
Like cities, like my love, it resembles
The seasons, it lives
With the sun for its head and the moon for its severed neck
I want to feel endless ardour
Monster of my hearing you roar and weep
Your mane is thunder
And your claws echo the singing of birds
Monstrous touch has penetrated me it’s
Poisoning me
My eyes swim away from me
And the intact stars are my peerless masters
The beast of all smokes has a blossoming head
And the prettiest monster
Tastes like the laurel and so must know distress

In the end I’m no longer scared of lies
The moon cooking like an egg on a dish
This necklace of raindrops will adorn the drowned girl
Here is my bunch of Passion flowers
Tenderly offered up by two crowns of thorns
Streets shine with long-ago rain
Diligent angels are working for me back home
Sadness and moon, they will wing it
All the blessed day
All the blessed day I’ve been walking and singing
A lady leaning at her window
Looked long at me as I walked away singing

On a streetcorner I saw sailors
Baring their throat to an accordion dance
I have given everything up to the sun, everything
Except my shadow

Sounding lines, bales, wails of sirens half-dead
Misty horizons swallow up the three-masts
Winds die away crowned with anemones
And sigh for the Virgin, pure sign of the third month

Templars on fire I’m burning amongst you
Grand Master, let us prophesy
I’m the sought-after fire pledged only to you
Your catherine wheel is spinning, oh beauteous beauteous                                                                                      night

Oh you who die young, I will blow out
The bondage-destroyer, the free flame of Ardour
My death will be glory and despair, I look out
As if I were sighting a target

Uncertainty, fake painted bird, you fell down
Sunlight and love danced back into town
And your gallant sons whether well- or ill-dressed
Built this great pyre, my courage’s nest