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

Bits of Kolkata,
broken tea cups in terracotta
return to form
as mud on the side of Shakespeare Road.

Tagore house,
whore house,
child toddled streets
and public spaces,
no dogs, no hashish,
no umbrellas
behind which the young may kiss
or even worse
two pensioners may join together.

Crows protected with shiny permits,
corvid smart like government workers
sweeping the city of paper
greasy as a handshake,
preserved with a black coat,
taking passage on lorry or cow.

Not like the sparrow in a pattern of returning
to a swastika of rice
laid on at the Jain temple,
rice with the richness of marble
polished off
on milk-cool marble with the richness of rice.

Crossing with the neat tumble of tiffin,
eighty four thousand yellow taxis
each headed with Ganesh
the remover of obstacles on the dash
taking people to where
it’s a long count of elephants to get to.

Raptors going up on
ninety per cent humidity,
Brahminy kites multiplied by kites.

A bantamweight man
moves ten times his own in onions.
The hand pulling rickshaw wallah
turns a living on its head,
sleeps off the Chinese whispers of a monsoon
under his livelihood.
Rain on plateaus of tin,
sinews pinging back.

Buildings scrape skies,
go up in a blink
on bamboo scaffolding,
no heavy duty machines
just smoke and mirrors
and magic beans,
unyielding giants on top of silicone yields.

Green worked fields
turn over a salary,
now dark as the goddess’s face
in Kali Yuga era,
spinning out bangles of oil in water.

Puja of
Durga, her eyes wide even in the
fast flowing eggplant clouds
of the Hoogli,
seeing from between
threaded brows.

A whole 5 o’clock sunrise
as if cochineal were strained through muslin,
like the bright wobble inside you,
something foreign in gut,
fruits of the internal flight.

That common feeling
of wanting to be
just where you are leaving.
Touching down,
no animals on the runway
but where the scapegoats
are backed with brown.