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

1

Lying on the grass in Holyrood, a dazzling thing, so soft and red, and yellow and blue, spun wide from threads of narrow plastic tape; a party nest, a children’s nest, the cycling of office waste to something deep and bright and simple, dark and ordinarily vital.

2

Two wrens: the first had been, presumably, hit by a car on the high lane over to Crick. Her heart was weightless and her slow eyes closed as she folded over, dying in my palm. We buried it next to the fence. My friend, who didn’t hold the bird, was interested only in its bones, and didn’t want to care about the dying.

     I passed the grave site often after that, but didn’t care to dig it up, despite his fascination.

3

A raven’s nest, woven from barbed wire, set in a cliff-niche next to the train-track up to Snowdon. It was only later that I realised it was probably just a hoax, but I loved the notion, up among the ice and scathing rock: a ravens nest, in fence-wire!

4

Startled, a crow in a full-grassed meadow, whitening; dandelions, high with seed, and yellow, and four-foot thistles and clover. A bobbing head on a broken gait, he topples down again to leave the field to pleasure: grass-mist in afternoon sunshine.

     “There’s no need to interfere. That’s just a kind of projection,” Richard said, and I held my heel from coming down on a crack-winged hornet, twirling round and round the dust (St. Catherine’s Tower, Dorset). Well this particular character, I decided, was much too big and sharp for me to help in any case. So there we left him to get on dealing with it, his death...

5

And a second wren darted beneath my wheel, same lane, same place, the following day. I had to stop, reverse the car, get out and check. Oh no...

     Then there it is, thank God, but only a dried-up curly leaf.