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

Woken by the ticking of the woodstove’s
cooling metal morning alarm, the sun,
rising behind pines, commands attention -
as when it rose behind lines of sea and sky
taut across The Narrows. My eyes,
imprinted with that distance, stretching
for a first sight of the earth’s edge
against obliterating brilliance,
are filled with the interruption of a tree -
the fifth pine north of the winter solstice
dawn seen from the kitchen window.

When we bought this land that tree
just visible, leaned a slender branch
on the roof of an old shed,
repository of a smallholder’s treasurers -
             buck saw, bridle bit, cod jigger,
             engine oil in liquor bottles,
             and a hand cranked grinding stone
             on weak wooden legs -
that I tore down when it buckled,
under the weight of pine and time,
posed danger to my children.
Its crown now spreads above the barn,
and that branch is a low grey elbow -
remnant of the unsupported weight of snow.

Pruning a sightline toward the sun
in intimate entanglement
with bark and scent and limb and branch,
sawing, stretched against the counterswing of wind -
          an eye to the eastern hill,
          the locus of dawn remembered,
          kitchen window low to the west -
I hold to a world of lichen along the top surfaces of branches -
               a shrub forest frilling a swell of hill against the sky,
               a frozen fronded ocean wave along a limb,
               a spoked dapple of olive-grey shadow mapping
               ground below -
survey field, pond and house from behind a whorl of stems -
              raised peacock train of sunlit candles -
and begin to doubt this culture of scission and arrangement.

Resting in the crown, the snow ground
a circle circumscribed by green
etched with radiant lines of lichen grey,
I recall gardners in Kyoto cleaning pines
with caressing hands, no blade or steel,
and the patter of needles sounding
autumn rain, drowned in the whine
of a shop vac cleaning a hollow bole
socket of an ancient broken limb.

In the regifted dawn of daylight saving time
I share now with that tree great peace,
and know the sun will press its circle north
and conjugate its rise, each day,
with a wilderness of tree.