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

Over the hills and far away. Over the hill
still far from understanding.

Will no-one help this man?

No need to draw a blade across your wrists
if only you could learn to hug yourself

Marooned, harpooned
he will not trouble you

and if the pen clipped to your pocket
jabs into your eye
fling it away - things that matter most
can't be fettered in vocabulary's jail.
How can you write the smell
of fresh-baked bread,
a sunset glimpsed while drowning,
a baby's lips uncompromising pucker?

he won't tell you
his sky is bottle-green

Let go of that fucker
who won't let you say goodbye,
don't scoff at the sucker
who pays millions for a mirage,
a stale pie in the sky.

he softens nightmares
in his mother's shawl

likes to bathe
the wounded eyes of frogs

And still the barnacles sing
mariners' ribcages rattle

every second soldier
deep in someone's pocket

no-one in the upper street
has slippers made for dancing

a good wife strokes the photo
hidden in her locket

he will fashion you a hammock
out of whispers

his touch on your elbow
will be invisible

and in the leaf of morning
eyelids drooped with dew

Mary parts the bracken
for her missing shoe

he will only show you wounds
that have left scarcely a blemish

and when the drum-beat fades
throats clogged with ash
no-one on the island
will remember the acid taste of green

he will sing to you a song
known only to the dumb

"God help you, Son", the old stones mutter.
Mutter, meine mutter, come back
out of the winds that long dispersed you

he will varnish your knees
to protect you when you pray

his eyes will be averted
except when yours are

he will teach your child
to suck sap out of bluebells

nourish me again
at those breasts that gave me peace
tell me tales of simple times
before the flood, the flow of blood,
the parchment

and the milk
his lips plead from you

in the passages of night
will leave a space inside you

in which flowers will grow

and then, on the far side
of the hill with nine horizons
Iíll slip foxgloves on my fingers
kneel on the slopes of my first meadow
let the barrel roll away

and he will water them