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

Textbook anticyclone off Dogger.
The boundary layer’s efficiency ends abruptly
in a humble plea’f cumulus — vent! vent!

The geostrophic air’s had days of photochemistry,
an’ the guilty pallor of the real air justifies
our simplest assumptions. You could work it out:

SO2 emissions,
a diurnally averaged hydroxyl,
the pressure gradient
(you know the latitude,
so you’ve got day length an’ Coriolis already,
it’s 52, we’re over the East Midlands
(which is patchwork'n flat)).

A bit’f Britain still patchwork?
Who’s putting that to work? One, here, at least
(now we’ve poetry: a sociological point t’be ’
all on an extrapolation fae yin).

The humilis ponds at h, the mixing height. Video this —
what student’d remain sceptical?
Nor video, there’s enough fly an’ get a windae seat.
A gas, that ideal escapology, layered like a cake.

A’ mhinisteir! They believe you already,
it’s proving it’s the problem — scaling the Richardson
Number and the Leibniz an’ Newton you need f’r it.

Our commitment to numeracy’s short’f that
needed for a democratic science.
So it’s an act’f faith t’box th’atmosphere,
an unsupported statement
that the smog’s the week’s fossil fuel burn ’cross Europe.

How much else is faith? Agri-business? The merit’f democracy?
Th’only number politics sees pertinent
is half: the fraction’f young adults
for the new prairies’f higher education.
Th’only number a worried student sees pertinent
isnae a number: 2.I. A meritocratic job.

The patchwork ablow howders wi’ the wellies,
the midges, the fulmars’f a worthwhile calculation.
We could understand the East Midlands,
an’ we’ve more time, more brains, than ever for it.