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

Why so many birds in the bare branches of your poems
flitting like titmice on a spring morning high in the pines?
Along your rivers and shores or plummeting down windswept skies,
tagged with Latin like shrubs, trailing banners like planes,
advertising the end of the world, or speaking Welsh? A parliament
of fowls in an age hardly rated for its inclination to govern, sing or rhyme
however inflected, or confected, of however many blackbirds,
or even warble, let alone boom, or caw, or coo, or honk, or hoot, or quack,
whoop, mimic, mewl, wail, shriek, pee-wit, or, crexing, ratchet back
the winding stars all night beneath your window,
a breath in the curtain and the moon a sea-green halo,
and the depth-charged surf full of wheeling, phosphorescent notes of
                                                                                              waders.

In the hope you might imagine a world without them:
no thrush on the ariel; no yellow-hammer on the droning wire,
begging for a little bit of bread and no cheese, on the back-roads now
only of memory; no wren’s loud voice in the winter ivy;
no chaffinch on the coldest morning ever recorded for March;
no wild swan whooping from the windswept lochan;
no ousel deafened by the stream’s spring force;
no lark ascending, no redbreast whistling, no parrot either,
in Amazon or parlour. Not one. Not anywhere, ever,
heard or seen, of this or any other feather. Mourn them?
They mourn themselves, their ghosts soaring from the lost glades,
the crashing canopies, rocketing on startled wings.