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

III

I thought I'd keep you in touch with the sport
this year away in New England - with your Red Sox,
Patriots, that grid-iron football: the American sort
of self-referential crap - faded-star commentators on the box
for their Super Bowl, their running O.J., their Opens closed,
their experts who call up bewildering stats
to constantly punctuate the practised, posed
camera-conscious "Hi, Mom!" bits. But I see that's
too distant now for you to care, too Welsh, too petty.
Still, in Cardiff Saturday-night, drunks rolled past us in celebration
of another Steve Robinson knock-out victory.
At the Arms Park, Ieuan's broken ankle felled a nation.
And the newspaper placards still proclaim our certain crash -
Wales Star Goes North. They sell our dreams for cash.

 IV

While Bron was being interviewed at Clare,
I walked the Backs and paid to sit
In King's College Chapel. If man's celestial need encloses air
And shapes a special place from stone and glass and wit,
Then none excels Wastell's soaring fan vault,
The whole arched magnificence finished by a screen of oak
That bloated, eighth Henry gave, and Anne Boleyn whose fault
Was to displeasure him. Her white neck stained the block.
There's blood, no doubt, on art that celebrates and saves -
Rubens's solid, fleshy, stagey Adoration,
The organ's apocalyptic bellow crashing in waves
Of need and praise over choir and congregation.
Fellows in Clare with frayed pullovers, decide your sister's fate:
The privileged faith of another age, uplifts, distracts me while I wait.