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

1

Because you are without punctuation
Unknown to me like language
Like bells ringing    forever
Marked by this  corrected
Paper falls to the  sound
Blank for silence  noise

To look is to  partake
Small tasks I might perform
And nothing is written across
The board   looks dark for your
Sweet skin  rooms are echoes of
Detained by perfume and unanswered

Questions
The need
To shake dust from
Your books

Not uniform
But a gossamer compound
Simple to say
But hard to pronounce
Your sentence

I live
What I have learnt
By heart

2

Herald of more than morning.
Bent low, lips to the hoar frost:
Kissing the green for life -
Taste of dew and new blood.
On long green neck, affirming.
Inclined to the growth.

Your yellow crown
Caressed by breezes,
Turns to me in time.
I feel the thaw
Of a longer winter, now.
Buried like a tuber memory;
Curling into blackened fibres.

Cast that transformation
Now, Upon these roots.
Let me break the icy membrane
With these embryonic hands.

3

Some discover through work;
Build to become;
Fashion a future.
I have none as such
                   My hands
Flicker like blind beggar's.
Cast senselessly,
                   Without purpose:
Still they have
                Housed your image
                           In my heart.

Some find through religion;
Fear of a cruel god cower,
Crossed and kneeling.
                       Hopeful devotion
I, too, await
                  Time of salvation
When the word turns
                  thou shalt not
To hosts of golden angels
                   Sighing Aleiua

Still more given to philosophy;
Reason as a guide
                        To consider
While time silts indecision.
Thought is denied me.
The torment of your translucent
                         Skin says `I am-
                         Therefore love.'

Others have solace in science
And rule of law.
Predicted events govern.
But from chaos - you.
Emerge again into
                   Universes new
Where each night
                   You fill my sky
                    Luminous moon.

Yet more seek in travel;
New life and dust of dead.
Count miles for growth.
I would venture
                      Only as far as me to you
A chasm I could float down
                      Dusky river
                      Stopping only
                   To kiss every drop.

Have always found through words;
Blanks carved to meaning;
For the still-born emotions
                   I have fathered.
But it is gone.
                Hard to see in
                This shadow you cast.
When your eyes
                       Sweet rhymes undiscovered
Mouth
         Alliteration I cannot taste;
Your hair
             Blazes metaphor;
                      Your full soft breasts
Personifications of love
                              And within
             Your hips
                          A rhythm

                      My pen has
                              Only
                           Dreamt.

Hands beg now - give me purpose again.