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

to Stevie Smith

I can well imagine God vegetating
Before the world began.
Poor old thing!
Can you imagine it
All that love, bottled up inside him
And no means of expression.

What a state to be in!
All that highly-charged energy
That goes to make up a truly living sexuality, which is love.
And no outlet.
No possible outlet.
What an aweful state to be in!

To know what to do with it.
Somehow, to be rid of it.
The wonder of it,
But oh, the folly of it!
And then—that most frightful moment of all
After the Fall.

The defeat.
After man, his particular creation
Had been killed off in the very prime of his condition
And something of himself had been killed off in the process.
What could he do about it?
What could he possibly do

Except start off all over again
And somehow become that wounded creature himself.
You know the rest of the story.
It is quite, quite extraordinary.
We forget what it took him in terms of will
And strength and (let's face the full force of the word) of sacrifice

To send us his son.
The son he had loved all along
Most of all, and couldn't bear to be parted from
For one moment. For one single moment.
He was desperate. Utterly desperate.
Luckily for us he got over it

So great was his desire that each of us
Each single one of us, should be
As we had originally been intended to be, whole.
All the many millions he had let issue forth
Out of a love that came dangerously close most of the time to wrath.
People forget all this at their peril.
And beauty, like love, once seen, is terrible. Utterly terrible.