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

Sun beautifies the tennis strokes. A hum
of racquet strings. Talk by the summer-house
suggests a branch of happiness. Now guests
are leaving, loitering by the door beside
the yellow valley, silent after so much
laughing . . .

Her husband died, she spent her days in the garden
and walked across the floors to watch the fading
daylight as she passed from room to room.
Outside — a war beyond soft Irish slopes:
in it someone she wrote letters to.
When the war ended he saluted trees
instead of officers. They farmed like poets,
digging deeply for a gentle word.
Can love be free of geography? He said
‘Place exists in you, the green
moderation of land, the well-tuned birds,
dewy routine of morning, the steadiness
of an unenterprising town . . .’

Partners in games on the lawn, swimming and
picnics on a sea-rock, reopening
a boy’s closeness to nature.
No one discordant, one topic uppermost —
shared time — shared also by
a landscape and its fauna. Each was
persona grata with the gradual dusk,
identified with woods and with the lightness
of flowers breaking from their sombre beds . . .

The rook-trees are neither brown nor yellow
but a finished green. The first pepper of leaves
falls on the wide lawn. The grass
doesn’t grow any longer. The sky a gloom-colour.
A shiver runs through the branches and the rain
drifts across the fields like smoke. Cows eat
the grass as if they didn’t notice it,
and the cold country looks not worth a thought.

Can no one raise a person from the dead?