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

I. raja.

The chains wore out as he kept going, there was no temptation to 
                                                                                             sleep.
The chains would not wear out if he slept, except from his lazy 
                                                                                          tossing.
His clothes had been ground to flour by the chains long long ago.
The journey was through an orchard that was always in fruit.
When he was hungry or thirsty he reached for an apple.
He had formed these procedures from the moment they had 
                                                                                 shackled him.
It was always an autumn of apples so he could not tell the years.
He loped tirelessly: the chains were thin and lacelike after so many 
                                                                          thousands of miles.
Their high chime had become shriller as their metal had worn down.
A link snapped and a strand fell away from his left shoulder,
Another caught on a root and like cloth-of-gold fell away from his 
                                                                                                hip,
Under its weight the tracery tore like tough silk never halting or 
                                                                                staggering him.
He was free, and loped away under the apple-trees.

II. bhakti

I sacrificed him in the chain-locker
As they weighed the anchor it was teeth on all sides
The bights earned their name, with the screeching of saws
Blood fell out of the ports flooding the tide
That bubbled with greedy fish-pouts. I had called up
The Iron Chancellor. I heard
A regal clanking like a linked regiment
Swinging their arms in a great assembly. I saw
Naked men and women swarming like white mites
In the mass of chains, the mashing corridors of his stride
And clangour of breath. Some died in blood
Many also dropped in a trail of the free that dropped from him
To couple, like free links. I heard his martial steel
Clanking up the outside wall of the mosque, it stopped,
I looked up and met the gaze of two empty links the size of 
                                                                                       archways
Stained with blood like tearful wax and white clouds blowing 
                                                                                          through.

III. karma

She hangs the wet shirts up like large soft flies, linked.
A sudden frost out of the east. Upon the line, the shirts freeze.
"Look!" she cries, carrying one in stiff as a chrysalis
Vast but very light, white-bosomed with frost.
"Listen!" she says softly, taking hold of a cuff,
Bending the arm, which creaks like a cello.

IV jnana

tick and clank together like clocks
like linked moments, though
each link was a year curving
through summer to rusty autumn
to winter cold as iron

with iron clothes on

ladders with closed rungs
ladders into the soil

I dared touch the sentences of the prisoners that issued from them
In cold links that were buried, the soil of England is full of these 
                                                                                            chains
Of shed blood, in linked sentences. As I dug in the kitchen garden
My spade clanged on them, I freed them with my trowel
Heavy with rust and clogged like the roots of a vanished tree.
See! the short sentences can be hauled out easily
Though some of these brief ones have exceptionally heavy links.
A long sentence is built like a necklace, to start with, the light links
And in the middle very heavy, though occasionally towards the 
                                                                                            middle
Slender links lay almost free from rust, denoting some bright  
                                                                                        friendship In the closed world of prison. Towards the end time dragged again
And the links grew thicker. Some sentences, the never-ending ones,
Plunged deep in the soil and wrapped bones:
The life sentences, whose later links gripped the earth's centre.

The soil rich in iron favours dusky grapes
Which grow sweet against our mellow walls.
When the monastery had ceased to be a prison - there was no 
                                                                                           record!
I like to think the prisoners suddenly found they had always been    
                                                                                                free.
One day some lifer in his cell to scratch his nose
Moved his hand out of its gyve before he realised it was impossible,
To and fro out of its ring he moved his hand, disbelieving,
Laughing, then like a cold metal reflection stepping out of a pierglass
One foot forward out of its gyve, back again, a sudden leap
Laughing at the empty husk riveted to the stone, through the door
(Never locked since the prisoners are chained) to the next cell
And shows his comrades there the simple trick,
They all leap from their chains, fall to their knees
Deciding to become monks, being accustomed to celibacy.

The late sun gilds their chains
Vacant like golden skeletons
Or like the skins of dragon flies hanging on the walls
Scrawling the stone with their late shadows.

Many cells crumbled, from others
They filed the stone free, hurtling them
From windows with musical explosions
Settling in the soil
Setting me my task. I leave them be
They shall become the iron in my grapes.

Though, those old people, they should not have tossed away their  
                                                                                            chains, They might be needed one day, ready to step into
Like scribbled steel selves, like men in chiming armour.