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

‘I could write a cliché about conservation here
but I won’t and I won’t because I can’t.’ The gesture
politics of that dead elm is sufficient and your own
reasons for driving above walking and mine for typing
on a laptop under fake light and not a typewriter
under an electric summer noon.

                                                 Where does it get us,
this wood, and these winding paths so like the paths
we’d like to make through the woods of our lifetimes
with their borders on the unsure growth but clear
and cleared to make our movements easier, our voices
lower, below the half-lit and otherworldly leaves?

There’s a viewpoint in this conversation like the viewpoint
we are standing at overlooking that landfill, the sight at first
as disappointing as a chain-saw in the chest of the fells
until you hear about how the fell-side is dug then double-dug
by the great gardeners in their bulldozers.

                                                                 It it true
that what we waste bends back to grind us. My rubbish
is also here in me, and I shove and shovel it around
every day, sometimes alert to its weight and stench
but most of the time too busy or bored to see or scent
the wealth and ruin of evidence, its blowflies, the extended
families of vermin. Much of that time you won’t notice it either
unless you take against me which I’m hoping this conversation
might prevent. As you say, if somebody takes against you
there’s no landfill can hide you or me, dig us, double-dig us
into cleansing soil.
                              So we wonder why we took against
                                           that fell-side, and against
these woods and small rivers; why did we move against
the limestone to scrape it into cinemas and chapels;
kick against the ferns in favour of a few sheep; against
the dale, chain-ganging its stones like they were criminals?
The ice-age had a knack for natural sculpture: that terminal
moraine and limestone pavement, that scarp and shelf,
those Scars and tarns – these were artistic successes, won
no awards; we bulldozed them like tower-blocks.

                                                                           We are not
mistakes on this planet which is why I could write a cliché
about conservation here but I won’t. Maybe you and I
who have never met are caught in no choice, separate strands
of sheepwool snared on a wire fence, blown and soaked,
sunned until we rot, unable to see or hear each other
but sensing the iron thorn angled through our spines.
                                                                        Move,
I want to say, talk to me across these winds.
We are dying out here together. There is more we could do
if we would move towards each other, to attend as Ruskin did
to Malham Cove when the stones of the brook were softer
with moss than any silken pillow; the crowded oxalis-leaves
yielded to the pressure of the hand, and were not felt;
the cloven leaves of the herb-robert and robed clusters
of its companion overflowed every rent in the rude crags
with living balm; there was scarcely a place left
by the tenderness of happy things where one might not
lay down one’s forehead on their warm softness and sleep.