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

In the meantime
what we receive is other peoples texts, dreamtimes,
trading in fables. Exactly where we are is somewhere
between the loss of childhood and the discovery of invented Edens.
Fighting for an identity all these years. Shoving our parents over
clifftops even as we adore them. Returning to sacred areas where
winter sun is all we seek, retreating to sacred stones and
conversations held on the edge. Every time the poem is written a
new song changes the singer and only the listener knows it is not new.
Discovering the old, discoursing between the grass and bones and there
is always that fond light that surpasses storm and the silence
of the night room where nothing can truly be said and meant.
Hallo. Are you the person setting out or settling for less or are you
the person who constantly returns? Goodbye then. Are you the self
who sets down these messages and provides provisional answers and lets
a psalm slip when all we had meant was a rather elaborate joke?
There in the hallway mirror is my mother still scolding me
for ruining the bulbs in what I had seen as the heroic jungle.
And there are the texts that I did not read in the school
library where the books ticked, waited, decorated, upheld.
And there is the orchard still crowded with voices as we
pick the apples, pull the rotten ladder out of the white grass,
rescue the chinese geeses from the fire, wait for the aconites.
Now you can hear skipping songs from the playground
and somebody has a radio on in one of the almshouses. Perhaps we will all
                                                                                        die because
of Cuba. In the late afternoon light the white horse becomes a unicorn
                                                                                                 again
and what the radio does not say is canticle, chorus, convulsion of angels.
Hallo again. Do you see me returning and what should
we say of the years in between? Nobody dances like Sonia in the winter
palace before the soldiers arrive and the band becomes blood. When the
                                                                                                palace
was set on fire all the windows popped as though ghosts burst through
                                                                                                  them.
The trees were also on fire as the patients from the asylum gathered as if
to sing and in each nest a vesper gently boiled. In the playroom
we sit and cut up images from magazines. Here is a girl with a dancing
                                                                                                  bear.
Here is a hotel with blue curtains. Here are the tennis courts in moonlight.
And in each image we cut up the words that must have existed. We
also invent words to occupy the images, the rooms that cannot be, the
names for the children who skate on the huge lake, small speech bubbles
for the factory workers in Islington, names for the soldiers who dance
in the winter palace and dig their spurs into the grand piano shine.
From the top bedrooms where once servants wept for entire lifetimes you
can look across the formal gardens, the lawns, the parks, the orchards, the
                                                                                                       forests
for hundreds of years. There also is the ruin of the plague village. There
                                                                                                        also
is the barn where spies were hung. And there is the hill where a maid
gave birth whilst flying a kite. Today sixty hot air balloons are
about to rise and fly above this scene of limited significance. In the 
                                                                                           meantime we
return to our memories and anecdotes and Press Cuttings and e mail and
                                                                                                  website
scenarios that urge us to compete. In the meantime I read of beasts and
                                                                                             barricades and
how the water is killing us all. The Irish are still fighting their seven
                                                                                      hundred year war.
In a house in Tipperary a cousin walks his acres the axe swinging by his
                                                                                                       side.
The house is slipping into a dotage of cats. The drive smells of cats. The
private chapel reeks of cats. There is a dead cat beneath every tree. It was
I think the household of Borodin that was dominated by His Grace The Cat.
In a house in Tipperary a cousin begins each evening with a strict piano
                                                                                                     piece
dedicated to the timelessness of cats. You can hear his playing from the
                                                                                                       main
gate which still carries scars of the rebellion. The remaining trees on the
                                                                                                       old
estate adjust their sails. Mad captains, high winds.