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

Lightning forks like a nervous system,
Glimmering fibres earthing in the hills,
In the boles of ancient beech, in birch groves,
In the breaks between limestone and granite where
                                                                  springs rise up.

Here the rain holds off or falls elsewhere
As moths come towards my light, colourless
Or tinted like stone or leaf, bark or mould;
In sunlight invisible to avoid the gaze of birds.

They demonstrate what ghosts must be like,
Concealed from us by day, at night flapping
In the corner of an eye, a twig hand
Snagging collars despite our care to duck and move aside,

A mouth opening then shutting quickly
In a plasterboard wall put up to make
Two more guest rooms in the Georgian house
Where no-one has ever managed a night’s unbroken sleep.

They have to hide themselves otherwise
An unrighted wrong in period dress
Drifting downstairs, a lifetime’s petty spite
Moaning like wind in the chimney, lunatic obsession

Grinding its teeth behind a locked door
Would be proof that paradise must exist.
Ghosts are warned off by someone else’s word
Or at least someone else’s words about someone else’s
                                                                                   word.

One night moths came to me as I wrote
In the ground floor library of that house.
The panes of the french windows were shiny,
Hard as obsidian as the moths covered them over.

I watched as the glass became opaque
With palpitating wings, legs, antennae
Then turned the lamp off so the moon shone through
And made a shifting, trembling population of shadows,

Of not-quite limbs, not-quite heads and eyes
On the bookshelves and picture frames behind.
Yet something or someone, I can give you
My word, did not breathe upon my neck whispering
                                                                            Believe!