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

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own...
                             - Wallace Stevens
 
1

Ochre brown flashing copper and gold
As midday scintillates the Powder Tower
In which a crazed King Rudolph’s magi toiled
With less success to transmute dross to ore—
A peripatetic Irishman, Ned Kelley,
Among them. Now that I’m another one
I name him my precursor and my ally
In my search for the true philosopher’s stone.

3

Occasionally in the garden I manage to catch
A bee in the act, exploring a buttercup
To carry off any nectar it can poach.
Each flower in sight’s a future honeydrop
And as for the one I plucked, all’s not lost:
Let’s try the childhood game in which you hold
It to your chin and, if you’re lucky, cast
A reflection the colour of butter, the colour of gold.

5

No sooner do I board a tram than I’m smitten
With love for a dowdy beauty’s Slavic nose
(Women of Prague!), then overcome with sudden
Compassion for a babicka’s scabby knees.
I watch her yawn, her mouth a huge expanse
Of slobbering tongue, gap-teeth and fillings not
So bright that they eclipse or recompense
Her for, beneath them all, a lifetime’s rot.
 
6

Finery, finery... I ponder the Child of Prague,
Orb in hand, crowned and robed in ermine,
Presiding over a sneakered, bussed-in flock
One of whom takes a snap and brings down a sermon
Like a last judgment on his head from a monk.
I ponder how sacred and profane co-exist
In closer proximity than he cares to think:
Shake’n’snow Child of Prague, body of Christ...

10

A mill in a wood in a valley: we get there at night,
Kick off our shoes in a dark, enormous hall, 
Then follow the banister upstairs towards the light
Where places at table will somehow be found for us all
And I, a total stranger, be invited
By the miller himself to drink my fill
Before I tumble to sleep downstairs serenaded
By the river slowly turning the mill-wheel.

11

Take this ceremonial smack of a spoon
Against an oil-lamp for a tuning-fork
And tell me what key the birds are singing in
As evening rallentandoes towards the dark.
Strain and you can hear the bat’s falsetto,
The snake’s elusive shuffle in the grass.
Listen: even the bloodsucking mosquito
With its single note is droning sonatas.

14

An ignorant cityman who’s never known
The names of plants in English, never mind Czech,
I find myself stopped short by the tell-tale sign
Of blushing red in the grass beside the track:
Strawberries I stoop to eat in handfuls,
Strange to the taste, dissolving sweet-severe
To leave me red-faced at my greedy impulse,
Wet-lipped, sticky-fingered like a lover.

17

Out of the world of July sunsets draped
Like golden peacocks’ tails across the river,
Glinting from infinite eyes or lazily flapped
In the wind and shaking colour everywhere,
I try slowing down to a moment of pure stasis
The action of light on water, its flickering dance
Too quick for my eyes; dizzy, they trump Heraclitus
On flux: failing to enter the same river once.

18

One brush with the weir is enough, its liquid scream,
And the meniscus of calm has come unstuck,
Bundling the river on its way downstream.
Illusion of stillness, there is no winning you back:
The glass harmonica player on the bridge
Has only to run his finger over its rim
For the smallest wine glass to get the itch
And overflow with a minute, ghostly hum.

19

Dusk, the Letná metronome blunt
Against the sky: the music is over. The street’s
A pool of shadows I’ve begun to blend
Into when past me in the darkness flits
That impudent wretch Ned Kelley shorn of his ears,
His crystal ball abandoned by its ghosts
And he, a ghost himself, to the gibes and leers
Of the Castle gargoyles leaning from their roosts.

20

There was no philosopher’s stone. Kelley, old crook,
Your final occult brew - the only one
To work - was the suicide draft you took
In prison, broken, desperate and alone.
This last drink tonight’s for you then, friend:
Moonlight through a whiskey glass I hold
Aloft sufficient wonder to remind
Me of how rich I am with such fool’s gold.