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

Passing shops, she stops to flick a light; cups it,
blue translucent gold, beautiful and warn,
like something small
and newly born, something frail, alive,
from all the wet and windy disbelief of tine and sky;
holds a blurred uncertain moment
(small wonder of the modern world)
fire within her hand,
the weird ephemeral dance of it on metal
- such magic in a quick unthinking click of plastic -
head tipped down to light her cigarette.

She looks up to the blue felt of a jeweller’s window,
her eye lit by a glittering of rings and things:
necklaces, a flash of facets cut to flatter skin,
bracelets, metal polished to a price,
diamonds, deftly placed, the hard edge of the market;
she watches glinting strings of rain begin
to gently gem the pane, accumulate
to curves of liquid weight,
gleamy wobbles - blobs of sodium gold -
streaming streetlight down the window,
and for a moment is entranced to some plane else.

Her mind, somewhere between the elemental jewelling of glass
and the sophistry of setting, polish, quickens
with intrinsic glitter (a sudden
bright epiphany bangling her day) as it flashes
on her that she owns it - glass-light, jewel-light - owns it all;
she smiles, a ring of white and gold (more lasting in the heart,
more simple, complex, beautiful than human
hand can craft), sees how passing light
- passing into her, part of who she passing is,
winking down the day’s dark strata, hardening into mind -
is hers: her already, by virtue of the insight, glinting,
                                                                   precious, rare.