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

On a sallow earl-grey morning
when the light is reluctantly stirred-in,
you will find her:
bowed by seasons of unforgiving wind,
quicksilvered hair whiplashing timechapped cheeks,
treading the tide-lip;
foraging for offerings spat up by the sea,
hurled up like cast-off bedpartners.

The sea snaps about her ankles
as she, panning the sand,
yearns to unearth her heart,
marooned and shingle-wrapped,
winking like a jellyfish.
Squalling gulls scythe haloes above her.

The sea, her mollusc shell, channels
through her; this ebb and swell
sucking her to it.
in her iris, far,
far into the horizon,
a salt-streak glitters.

She returns to a Hansel and Gretel house,
crouched behind ashen, splintered dunes;
coated with tiger-shells and crab claws,
bottle-caps and rust-laden thimbles,
century-old coins and rotten kindling.
Kale and pennied pebbles skirting the path.
a confettied bride of flotsam and jetsam.

Once, turfed from a storm-tossed sleep,
she’d searched earlier than usual,
when the sea-night, open-mouthed,
was drenched a luminous indigo
and the moon pooled for diamonds,
and she’d found agate embeddied in spotlit sand;
a globe unfurling in her hand,
multi-blue rivulets simmering into her veins.

It lies enshrined in the hollow by the hearth,
where once a sailor, broad and sun-buffed
had rocked, heavy hob-nailed boots
clomping on the grate,
as he laughed a whalesong
and stars waltzed in his eyes.

Every morning, as the sea,
mercurial, ravenous,
slaps the sand,
she will sieve her beach.
Every morning praying that
it will return
him
to her.