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

I — A Gift

He is the Tribune of The People,
He is Babeuf. The others speculate,

But he is Babeuf. The others
Speculate and steal. Gracchus

Out of Plutarch, he takes
The crudely fashioned knife

Made by his son from a candlestick
For his (the father’s) suicide.

He hones it on his eloquent tongue.
He says, smiling enigmatically:

Here, it is yours. Do what you can.

II — Alternatives

One announces in papers:
Seeking the patronage of the rich

To further my work. For a decade
It will always be noon.

Nobody’s wealth intervenes
Between freedom and time.

One in despair discharges a gun:
Nevertheless, he goes on writing

Noblesse oblige with seven balls
Of shot in his brain.

Making accurate measurements,
Another says: Here we may build,

Here we may bathe, here we may breathe.

III — A Letter

There must be horses. There must be women,
There must be lawsuits. There must, moreover

And eventually, be justice. There must be words.
I write down words. Are we lost in our names?

Yesterday I spoke for hours and nobody stirred.
Rapt. They cheered. I am a hero.

I said words like action, money, love, rights
And was moved to elegance, alliteration,

Saying, apropos of what I did not know,
Palfrey, palindrome, pailing, palinode, palisade.

IV — Born 1851, Henry Demuth

Neither wife nor daughter, posterity nor poem
The shops of Soho nor the Soho whores

Could feed Prometheus’s progeny
The year of this begetting.

Whose mother was called Lenchen,
Whose sister called him Frederick,

Whose father touched the pulses of the poor
And wrote, and wrote, and wrote

Would drive his taxi through the filthy
Town for years while every bell

In London rang out Manchester and More!

V — Bakúnin in Italy

Wagner’s face is still illuminated
Over Dresden in that fire I fed

And in the glow of it I see my sister
Walking through the snow beside Turgenev.

Did I spit my teeth out in the Peter-Paul
Only to release the homicidal genius

Of Nacháev? I should have been a Jesuit,
A Mason. Castrati sing the International

And dance the choreography of Karl Marx.
I should have been a tenor playing

Sophie Hatzfeldt in an opera-bouffe
By Ferdinand Lassalle.

VI — Zurich to London, Tzara to Trotsky

A black horsehair sofa, Lev Davidovich.
A predilection for exaggerated widows’ weeds.

An oratorio by Handel, Lev Davidovich.
A gaudy-feathered peacock under glass.

A red plush chair with a gilt frame.
An enormous mahogany wardrobe.

Face of an Odessa jailer cut in crystal.
A Crystal Palace and a Christian Prince.

Nickname, The Pen; weakness, Beauty.
Already you are old. I have just been born.

VII — A Painter*

Marc Chagall knew nothing
About dialectics.

Gaily, daily, in Vitebsk,
Cows & horses danced in the air.

Superstructure he hopelessly
Muddled with structure.

Gaily, daily, in Vitebsk,
Cows & horses danced in the air.

After October, Chagall was
Commissar of the arts for a year . . .

But was dismissed: The Man
Leaping Over The City.

Daily, daily, in Vitebsk,
Icons of Lenin & Stalin objectively stare.