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

Who is he, else,
but the traveller strange,
who knows his alleyways
and rooftops,
    you can bet he does.

He feels under his eyelid
the diesel pulse,
understands the smell
of hot oil that rises
    off his thumbnail.

Dawns, for him, are made
of two distances crying
in his heart.
A far one, and a further.
At midnight, his hair
blows with a sorrow
borrowed from Orpheus.

Ice creaks in the reed-bed, listen.
The last seagull of the day
brings down for him
the cold, black sky.
Why, even the ferryboat itself
lets out a cry on his behalf,
as it furrows the freezing tide.

The peculiar stone,
warming in his hand,
has a life he cannot know.
Oh, all these things,
even the familiar weight
of his clothes, measure out
the ways of true death.

Let the flickering dancer
make her final pirouette
on the bloodstained point
of the victrola.
But remember, we all of us should,
the egret, in its pure white robe,
sentinel on a mudbank,
all alone.

The lesson of its solitude
tempers false hope,
draws around good cheer
a dark and final line.

If you take the watch
the traveller takes,
then thorns of the rose
will be your business.
From God knows where,
a darkly radiant rain
will spatter, night long,
against your neck,
though the sky be clear.

Sojourn would not be a word
for what we do here.
We are hardly sustained.
But, by luck alone,
some of us make it.
This poem acknowledges them.
And then. And then,
condemns them,
along with the rest.

To us, and to himself,
the traveller, the start
and the finish of his journey,
and all that falls between,
is a mirage, simply that.

I think, as you sip on your coffee,
you can taste the emptiness
you supposed the traveller’s shade
could fill.
For beauty and truth
are the only two upon the road.
They meet whom they meet.
And even the best of us,
he told us so, could not
discern between them.

Fat chance, then, for us,
who cannot move for darkness.
What we can do, though,
is wave goodbye.
And I’ve been doing that all along.