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

I

Words and practicality
live on different landings.
They don’t see each other for days
then suddenly meet doing the laundry.
it is their hands which have a lot in common,
this ritual of washing
and lighting candles.

II

today I wanted to purchase a religion.
even an overpriced fake one
in a giftshop
full of tinned biscuits
and harpsichord music.
I spent too long looking
for what wasn’t there
and the lady thought
I was an indecisive shoplifter.
I used to shoplift a lot, spiritually
but then I got bored
with other people’s treasures,
like a magpie which realises
that its own nest is childish,
a fantasy of other people.

III

love affairs do for a while,
deep red blue
stained-glass windows
which get smashed
and re-made,
then work makes us separatists,
struggling to complete our universe
before someone else gets there first.
I discover I am an ant
without a colony.

IV

in my sleep
I attended a religious ceremony,
I so wanted to go
to a place
where the stones were slow with presence.
nuns in white linen
were passing something down a line.
it was not uniform though,
and you were allowed
to speak and move
between the building and its outside.
a stack of Bibles caught my eye
but I didn’t get to touch one
until I woke.

V

there was a house for a while
where I could take off my shoes
and think, but this woman
kept coming up to me,
with her dogma on a lead,
and asking about my silence,
how much it weighed, its density,
whether it was good at maths.
‘I don’t want to be rude’ I said
‘but prayer wants a sandwich alone’
like a monk at a service station,
I left hurriedly.

VI

but the motorway
is not as intricate
as the lavender garden
and the soul dies if it spends too long
on the hard shoulder.

VII

I supposed my soul had died
in a road accident
but then, one autumn,
alternating between height and gradient

my thought was alpine
and I found it in a leaf.

the forest was full of them,
cobwebs and ferns
and trees held in fright
like the Pompeii people.
the sound of a river
let me cross,
a water-saint
offering a rope bridge
of light and green,
into the clairvoyance
of the present moment.