Geoffrey Godbert
Red Sky at Night
A painter’s sky, if only he
can get his brush to work in time,
applying the great haze of colours,
accomplishing throws of red
which splash and spill in horizons
across the universe, on a curve
of shepherds’ delight of vivid,
intoxicating days to come,
for which I cannot find the words
as easily as I once could,
having been touched all day by death
and the worry of silent,
impending infirmities
creeping up on me, when all
the poems of all the poets
strike like illness and sound like the end,
until, that is, this firework display,
which seems specially sent from heaven
to weep from my eyes with sight as bright
as the blinded depths of darkness,
force-feeding what remains there of words
dripping for air in the sewers
of my immobility, my life,
whose new good health looms from death-
threats of how little time is left
for all the love of all the world
to come true from the deformities
grown out of my life-long dreams
of better hopes and better things
into this painter’s sky now scrawled
with utterances taking the shape
of a kiss blown across waiting lips
by the wind of loving, hoping
expectation and its music
stolen for a moment from silence,
so that I may lift up my head
and begin to slowly speak and then,
and only then, to sing out loud
as at the end of the end,
the beginning of beginning
Page(s) 58-59
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The