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

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Matt Simpson

print this page

Moonlight on Aegina

My mind keeps doubling back
to that snug back-lane necropolis,
its firefly night-lights
quivering on marble tombs
set out like tables at a wedding
the last guests gone an hour ago.

The Greeks don't see their dead
as really dead. And who can blame them?
forfeiting all that passionate light,
purples, cobalts, sapphire skies,
jasper or turquoise seas. How
could they ever be happy in
a nothing-doing blind eternity?

Persephone and Dis go hotly at it
down below and doesn't she
come flouncing back for half the year?
Bones are buried treasure. They defy
something that always wants to be denied.

And there's always the moon
to put an unresenting face on things.

I keep homing in on that cemetery
as a place not to be afraid in, a place
of love still, asking you to imagine
that death is not an end but a continuing,
not just of atoms that disperse
and randomly regroup, but of obstinate
redounding memory

perhaps of strolling back, tipsy with talk
from a lingered-in taverna, and walking
among graves with the sea - thalassa! thalassa!
two hundred yards away
down a wine-dark jasmine-scented lane.

Back to top