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

This night was crossed with blood
As if forgotten fevers resurrected
Their magic-lantern histories of death:
An old man waking in a chilly dawn
I feel a premonition of remorse
Rise like a mist upon the waking earth.

And yet the sun, bright dipper of the seasons
Spills his bronze milk upon my path
Bathing the patient questions of my feet:
The map’s unknown with siren voice invites
Between the light and leaves, until I see
The spattered blood of poppies in the wheat.

I sought the early landmarks of my love
Whose constancy once bore me in its shell
Fragile unscathed through every perilous reef,
A precious flaw in time whose diamond rage
Struck the glass folly of the impious brave
Who sleep unceasing tributaries of grief.

But I endured! Even beyond the rocks
In summer meadows’ aphrodysiac scents
I shielded unappeased my constant fire,
Along the archipelagos of delight
Where each sense swoons for love, moving alone,
Among the shining dancers of desire.

I moved alone in pride, in silent anguish,
Naked upon the lances of the sea
And her face only at my journey’s end:
Calypso, Circe, these were shadows only,
The slim-limbed charmer passion’s counterfeit
Whose silky fingers summoned up no heat.

Home was my hunger, and on freezing seas
I dreamed how summer prickles and sings hotly,
And drowsy voices murmur under the limes,
Or black-fanged winter finds us by the fire:
But Tiresias’ voice was ever at my ear
Warning of violence and this last lone voyage.

So there was never an end: for still my fame
Lay snares before me; and that myth I made
The one sure bulwark in a ravenous sea
Of time, was stronger than the blood and lust,
But with a cunning cage of barbs and spikes
Locked me in my own sad-eyed effigy.

So I became a hostage to my deeds,
Churchwarden of infernal parishes,
And all my victories broke out like sores:
This is the ghost the histories will not mention
The dead that found no peace, the living dead,
Whose anguish forged the arms of future wars.

Whose blood then crossed my sleep
This night, as I lay by my fateful burden
Symbol of voyages ever recommenced?
For I have passed from history, no one knows
What happened next: or whether I met the stranger
Whose question tamed the hunger in my eyes.