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

Strong and supple, pulling freely with the icy currents,
wading like a young strong free white whale towards your destiny.

Meander back, white, arched and artful,
knowing coves that you have melted with a will.
Curved your body to their coasts a thousand times, been tied and thrown
                                                                                                             up
by their tide, melded with their messy, dirty shells and clingy sand.

But bored. Beached and bloody, scraped by stones,
you cling to clammy rocks where you were born. They have worn your
                                                                                             handholds
for all these thousand years.

Beyond the disc your cold grey glance can span,
beyond your land, horizons murmur thickly,
unexplored. A river floating islands to be leapt on.

You strain hard, your lungs are bursting, draining
out your energy with perfect strokes
to let you live, no panic
shows between your statue lips.
Until at last
one
day, they let you

slip between the sheets of ice
and roll out with the tide.

Become green quartz.
Discover secrets, explore a path not known to us.
Hewn by hands too hard for man to understand,
exquisite plan.

And between each point a chasm lithe
and holding certain death
if, with whispered screaming in your breath,
you take a fall.

Follow rules and physic laws
of your new land, gasping,
grasping at the topmost branches of your
deep-dark bonsai tree.
You are the out of place and
alabaster queen of green
quartz chess men here.

Find the by, and then
with green quartz sand
beneath your feet,
you find its creeping up around your toes, and grows
you in. A tender statue of
another woman warrior,
crying by your menfolk
in the wilderness.