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

Having flung my French-windows wide to carry my coffee
out to the terrace canopied by flowering
bougainvillea, I turn back and flick on TV:
night sky is blossoming over Kabul.
‘L’attacco! L’attacco anglo-americano!’
It has begun but they have no details.
More bombs explode; outside more petals flutter
down. I breakfast, sweep up the pink harvest.
Still on low boughs their profusion seems undiminished.

Here in the islands, blue sea to boundless horizon,
hydrofoils arrow in and away at Marina Corta;
Germans trawl the Greek theatre-mask collection
in the Museum; grapes ripen to picking.
Karen is off to Palermo, ‘fed up with drinking and sunburn’.
‘Buon giorno!’ – il Capitano, waddling along the Corso
wearing the same yellow shirt, or another one.
He eyes my boots: ‘Good walking!’

It is. As always when one turns from the coast,
steep. Engines off, scooters freewheel past me,
I pass the Chiesa Maria dell’Annunziata
perched on its skew of steps. At Quattrocchi the view:
a savage west-coast sweep to rock-fangs jutting from water,
then the swart hulk of Vulcano,
lopped like a boiled egg, issuing poisonous vapours.

The reek of a fumarole somewhere behind me
I gaze out at Filicudi and Alicudi
humped on the sea, and settle among the broom,
Leopardi’s ‘lover of sad abandoned places’
that he saw when, raising his gaze through the broken columns
at Pompeii, he lambasted the vainglory
of his own age, and thought of unending galaxies
‘to which not only man and the earth, but the whole
sum of our stars are either unknown, or appear
a misty point of light, as they are from here.’

Hubris raised the Twin Towers, and has erased them.
Our planet spins, the blue I stare into
lapsing out of sight does not comprehend
New York’s grief, where dawn has not yet broken;
nor tonight’s bombs raining down on Kabul.