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

Breakfast, and he’s not yet quite at toast level,
He’s just gone a few rounds with the Devil.

*

Pain has its devices,
Relief its surprises,
Sleep its caprices
And Death its high prices.

*

Trying to tell the others what the stain meant
He found he had invented entertainment.

*

‘I felt deep contempt from the horse.
I respected it very much of course.’

*

It’s not the same to write as walk a mile,
Naturalism is just another style

*

Oh Grandad,
not yet dead!
Your garde unavanty
and you almost seventy,
all stalk and no leaf,
‘I have wasted my life’ -
Getting up early
to notch up a nearly,
metering and rhyming
instead of screaming,
envying and despairing,
stupidly ‘desiring
this man’s art and that man’s scope -'
the great escape
to private truth
gone like your teeth,
and note, Grandad,
the clock by your bed
is timed to go off
when your heart’s had enough -

What a black future
to be out of the picture,
but look on the bright side,
somehow you’re alive -
as of now, Grandad,
the worst’s only bad.

*

Perhaps Christianity is like Cavafy’s barbarians,
it would have been some sort of solution.
But also perhaps Man is a pollution
Poisoning Geoffrey Hill’s Canaan for his God.

*

The best way to define me
is not to quote my words
but to borrow the archive of my dreams.
You could make a pop song out of them
but they will furnish just as well
the only true religion in the world.

*

If love were true even once
you could build a fort from it,
an environmental programme,
a ladder leading up to Heaven,
and death still wouldn’t be impressed.