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

                                                  Hearing

The scald-man with his harp struck up
To the glory of the former kings.
He scratched the old silver of the airy world
So that from the angelic mouth which caps the air,
As bells do a bronze sip of sound,
Endless strains of song poured down on us.

“Heimdall hears a cat’s footfall on a floor of pine-needles,
He hears a newt scuttling along the bed of an unskimmed pond.
He hears the rush of sap within a tree,
The gasp of air across an eagle’s pinions.
He hears the flurrying voices in the heart of Man.
He hears the hammering of the Sun’s iron heart,
He hears the word
Whispered by Wodan into a dead ear:
Rebirth.

                                                    Taste

Laid as a nit on the unfallen blossom
From the heart of the apple
The grub burrows it own natal passage, core to peel:
On chafts through apple-flesh, then on wings through air:
His wings buzz in the air, his chops are soft on the white globe.
This was the Serpent’s eloquence, his sharp mouth -
Fermentation intervenes,
Temptation is swallowed in the luxury of flesh -
Work, apple, impluse, all are one.

                                            Smell: the wolf.

In the thicket of all essences the Earth exhales
The grey head lifts into the wind.
The muzzle is primed with scent-sparks.
The owner-of-many-sheep snuffs the laden air -
Freighted stream, dilator of time, dew of reek.
Husks of the divine real! Auspices!

By night he sends dreams to lull waking shepherds
And the trail is dreams to him.
Images, cramps,
Tremors stir in his lungs and musculature
Like winds which lash wakes in grass downs.
His four limbs think in miles
(Scent: from nostril-stir to Time and plans,
From wafts to bearings and search patterns.)
His jaw clicks stilted pictograms of flesh,
His canine ails for fur and fat.
His brown heart longs to eat up smaller hearts.

In His head the shadow of each limb is stronger
Than in the lofty head of Man.
Thought pours in His head thick as blood-marrow.
The sheep, cavorting! the silly sheep
Gushing round his bones like becks round rocks!
The mutton bellowing strides to his tendons!
Smells make reeks to pour from his own pelt.
The wind hitting his hide spatters the image of a wolf
by droplets across the landscape, nosescape.
Heavy as Burgundy, high as six-day pheasant,
Those two saps, scent and thought, roll in two gullets.

                                                     Touch

The king in His robe sewn with stars and bells
Sits in state, clutching orb and sceptre-
The wand summons winds from dead skies,
The world-apple puts dominion in His palm.
In His eye the shapes of desire form,
On his gold eye the fingers slide and covet.
With fists clenched tight and lips smiling
The concentrator of the arable fortune
Holds His Majesty in His hand.

                                                     Sight

The smith is working patterns onto a sark.
The eye drives the hammer. The hammer
Drives the metal. The metal assumes shapes
Of beasts, conjured from the forests,
Invoked by the sacral brotherhoods;
Of dragons, guarding metals deep within the world;
And harvests, fleece of earth, waving in the wind.
A bramble of visions bites its way into the forging.
Images well on the thawed metal. Their contour
(Quenched in the butt of sooty water)
Freezes and lingers. The images on the eye
Shoot back into their forest and are gone.

                                Sense no. 6: the empty cistern

The intellect rejoices in a VOID.
The monk has vowed to starve the maw of sense.
A tiny garden recalls him to rebirth -
Rare herbs growing, like thoughts, from painful nurture.
His soul, a bird shed of clods or limbs, soars
In the bede-hut; a stone-martin.

The bare cell is tomb, fore-doom
Of earthly pleasures soon severed, yet saved
To the pure man in the wilds.
All human history passes on a painted fleece,
The mind dwells to satiation on a single word.
From that word a forest sprang, the bookstaves quick
In illuminated sheaves.

A blind bard muses on his imagery.
Flowers bloom in darkness.
He moves slowly along blindness like a hand along another’s skin,
He moves in sureness like the seed fast in the January earth.
Dew, sweet daughter of night and cold, endrops
A thousand moons. Songs
And spells fall as dew from the dark face of Night,
Moon-minted shillings from a stellar noon.
In some ale-bodied night in Middle England,
He sings the best of men, the best of horses,
The best of swords and the best of women.