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

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16.1.16

Shoosh! I wish I could shoosh till I heard
Not my blood or my breath or the buzzing in my lugs
Or when, the wind drops in the bush, my thoughts
And what they think in. Shoosh in the gaslight
What do you hear, when the mantle’s sputtering, treadle
The wheels of the sea?


20.1.16

Now Cush, son of Ham, begat
The Babel builder (bless him!)
A storey for every tongue from
Patagon to the Hindu Kush.


22.1.16

WHOOSH!


24.1.16

A gnarly tree and every flower
Full as a louche. A dust arcade
With billiard hall, two travel agents,
A plastic surgeon, some antique shops.
A wild smell of pork and antiperspirant:
“A big sword, then? Abu Sayyaf
Sold these to buy their M16s!”
A Song grenade, sweet celadon.
Flip-flop in the heat, as though
Your spine were a stem, yourself
An insect bathing in the calyx.


2.1.16      Bush

An old party game–cum-psychological test had me describe
A wood, a path, a watercourse, crossing it, and so on.
When asked to describe the path I said there is none…

Each word is rooted in time and reaches out across its congeners;
The only way round one is through another.
I’ve found myself climbing up a fallen tree towards its roots,

Balancing on wattle, hacking through an argument when it wouldn’t let me go,
Till the only thing is this negotiation of dendrites that fork and twine,
And the only other hope’d be some apocalypse – grey boughs

That grow as you watch; a thousand years of blossom
in a minute – the burning bush.


2.1.17

Boor – bushcrafty butcher
Big as an ox. I’d cut
The condescension in your name
And in yourself.


2.1.19

Book – the body of learning sliced as fine as Parma ham,
Seasoned and served up in two tiles of birch bark.
Surely not.


24.1.19

REPLACED

24.10.19

Like is when the poem’s running
Fine before the wind,
Metre and rhyme and sense all
In agreement. I don’t like it.


24.10.17

In the wood
The shadow behind me on the path
Is the absence of those before me.
The breastbone harp was there to be strung,
The strings are broken, the bones are dust
And many a lie is older than the liar.