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

1 Phoenicians

In early May, singing uninvented songs,
they climbed the hill to the high field,
praying in the shadowed Roman ditch
and marking the tunnel entrances.
They talked of ancient graffiti- the image
of the horse, Ireland crucified and-
in the rarified, pre-dawn aura of success -
of the buried armouries they'd find.
They'd keep place as place, cleansed of  placelessness,
and make the low, post-English hills
a Hades of the placeless world, seeing
a newly fleshed-out view, shining,
that called for Eve, renewed by death,
to rise out of the grave again- her hair
shocked white by sin- her heart
so broken with remorse that she'd do anything
to be pitied and then killed again by them.

2 Heritage, Southampton

Someone was executed near the reservoir.
That's good. Near the A33.
A butler killed for stealing plate. His soul
is trapped in water, slippery, like
a pale organ, shot from the skin,
dropped by butter fingers into place.
Meanwhile, in Lord's Wood, archaeologists
dig banks and ditches that did not
exist before they came to make
a cold, prosthetic history. Quaint,
how they make the ground look old.
The Cutted Thorn beside the road
seems like a place of ritual, ancient,
instead of something just made up
so we'd be passive within history.

3 Kore

I sang the field edge, bloody minded,
lyrical - the nameless row of cottages
along from the silos, the grain depot.
I saw my father, my fracturing,
in the distance with a gun, walking
out of first light- a clear remembering-
with a pheasant in his hand, for us.
I found a schoolgirl in a ditch, fainting,
and walked the course of the run.
Her earthen arms kept me lingering
by the hedge, where she painted her lips
with a rain-wet blackberry, strangely.
She liked to see herself as innocent
and, as a symbol, she overwhelmed the loss
of place in me by grounding it in flesh
and then, as symbol, place was held by her
until she too was locked inside a myth.