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

(1)

Forests, snowfields, the moon drifting.
High farms that cling for life
to hill-curve in the north wind weather
fisting down from Canada.

Yet here in spring you see
a graze of heifers sunning in mild pastures
while an old grubber in jeans and shovel-beard
sweats to fix a worn-out McCulloch.

(2)

Carruth in northern Vermont
spent years observing his neighbours:
Johnny Spain, Marshall Walker, John Dryden,
and hammered from their likenesses
poems of humour and grit.

Wouldn’t you too live up there
through a season of ice and dark
your hands calloused with work
your lower spine drumming
for a little of the gold he found?

(3)

Early morning, hunters polish rifles
in clouds of breath, dream of bears

on a mountain road, and disappear for hours
into the shadow-silence of trees,

their plain, spare spirits
having fingers lightly daring death

till it comes with a sudden movement
under a cloak of leaves yards ahead.

(4)

Kumin in New Hampshire
raising horses and writing.
Fall’s brown and brass days
make way for months of blue ice.
She phones Anne Sexton
for the daily master-class.
Slowly the miss-hit nails
ease out and true ones grip.
One day a raft of words duly launched
becomes the Henry Manly poems
and House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate.
Years later someone axes wood
an echo rings across ravines.
Each blow splits a wound wide.
Anne has called up nowhere
and become her own dark.

(5)

Your lids are heavy
you open a book
you open a door
and you are there at
Eagle Pond Farm.
The high slopes are snowbound.
A figure, far off,
walks her dog through drifts.
Already her blood is sick
already a silence takes her hand.
It’s Jane Kenyon.
She disappears between
the under and the upper whiteness.
You follow her footprints for miles.
You might wake
at any time, hear
the snow-plough opening the lane
in a year she never had.