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

You must have made the witches quiver
feverishly with stony hands and delinquency.
You gothic genius, back breaker
snake charmer, rustler of leaves in darkness

cold and always cold.
Your bleeding heart is humble
your pupils do not dilate.
Wandering hills shadowed by your monster
sky falling
                    down
                                   in
                                            clouds.

Stony fingers wrap around rapture
as motorbikes melt into a setting sun,
I could have came stony-man,
I could have came
but it was all too easy to discover,
heat was burning up a thunder,
a river retched its empty bed
your mouth as wide as space’s eternity
the words you spoke unsaid, unheard, undelivered
unto my ears, but I believed them all.

Oh stony-man stoop now next to me,
your witches have gone to their works
and stake-burning businesses
but purple hills are still
rolling beneath this moon,
your jagged jaw is still
worthy of this hours thought,
let me hear your gravel tongue
spittle through scenery.

Not made of iron, not made of dust or bone
you are punishment of the stonemason;
to carve a man who is made of stone,
but he gave you a bleeding heart
and a poker of red hot anger to burn.

You are an angry man.

Hooded witches are in their coven and
cozening against you.
Men on motorbikes have melted with their metal
               [They were so beautiful to touch,]
                              [so silky, so piercing, so smooth skinned]
but I have stayed stony-man on our bedded giants
who are sleeping in this starry enterprise.
your pebble eyes are crying……
again you are weathering your face with tears.