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

1. Wake

The chicken body dances from the blade
The rattler’s head reflexive, tail twitching until sundown
despite the shovel’s halving
The venom still vital after twenty five years
Our voices tender until the telephone click

Brain death doesn’t kill the body
A slow and gradual death
is all there is      the moment of death a fiction
dead instantly a merciful white lie

People sit up, fart and twitch long after they are apparently dead
And how legion the hearty Celts
rising to dance at their own wakes

Death knells on graves once warned watchful families
that the newly buried wanted up and out
Until the last bell is tolled
But are they ever the same
after having been buried alive?
Zombies, the undead bloodless
newly recovered and at the mercy of their loved ones:
Do you really want him up, Edna?
let sleeping dogs lie, then

So there comes a time
when we must say dead enough
life’s for the living

Goodbye then
for our life together is thrice dead
the day I stopped talking
so lost my head
the day I stopped trusting
so lost my heart
the day I stop wanting you in my bed
will come soon
but the body dances to its own tune
mostly dead is enough


2. Zombie

Drawn to the undead
the stages of dying not mourning
she has forgotten her role
takes the play too seriously
a macabre script

In Tibet they build doorways low
Zombies can’t bend, won’t enter
She starts a list of carpenters

               The stages of death
               :Earth, the heavy loss of energy
               :Water, the death rattle
               :Air escaping the lungs
               :Fire cooling the body
               Cold feet, warm heart, good karma
               The next stage of your soul’s life directed
               :Ether: when the last of the bodily fluids
               drip from the nose
               or other orifice

               Take the body
               The spirit is free
               for forty nine days
               to choose a new home

Cats may chew on the corpse
or dogs or goats
wolves even maggot flies in their larval stage

Guard it, although
it no longer feels the teeth tearing

Today she feels something
: lintel on the forehead
: dog-bite on the arm
: silver bullet in the heart