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

1

And so at last I left
Wounded from head to foot
Dreams all fuddled
But still intact I tell myself intact
Revived by the brilliantly nubile showers

I took my time in the early morning
Sipping a mint tea in the local café
Before catching a flight to the far side of the world
Three hours away from the cemetery-republic
Where I’d spent my life waiting for a miracle

I cast a last glance back
At the electrically-operated gates
Of the new masters’ plush residences
Thrown up in haste
As if to guard against the evil eye
And any chance of ghosts of justice waking

2

Odours of the terroir that keep breaking in
Bring back the vertigo of being dangled
From the topmost floor over a city
Deformed but so beautiful still
Over the heads that throng the streets
Lit by the torches of sham celebrations
Over a sea embellished
With small boats all adrift
Over the bars packed with hardened informers
And nightclubs run by colonel torturers

Over the ceaseless aftershocks of an earthquake censored
Hunted down into the narrowest fissures
Of the tectonic plates of my surviving memory
Of the time of dry heaves flooded in blood

3

I swigged out of dubious bottles
I smoked everything forbidden

It’s so quiet I’m hearing
The voices of my childhood
Singing in chorus

I sat myself down on the ground
I wiped clean the white marble of the spat-upon tomb
And I fell asleep

4

Your hand seeks me in the night
Timidly it wakes me
And halts at my heart
Lingering there
Clutch and caress both

Your hair it covers my face
I inhale perfume of the ocean
The henna’d Sahara of your passions
The breath of trees of virgin forests
In the spring when they’re for being lost in  

On your back I trace those flowers
I’ve yet to give you
And your tender insurrectionary eyes
You’ve bewitched me with

I broke my watch
Attempting in vain to stop time