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

It is difficult to think small surrounded as we are by sea.
There’s too much water, sky and weather to think of little things

like buttered toast, or a bee trapped in a shut room, or a red  
                                                                                      balloon.
I can’t help conjuring loud words to go with the panorama,

like anarchy, madness and the screaming habdabs.
Turner would have done something with these plum-

purple waves, the beryline, verdigris breakers, ochreish clouds,
and charcoal horizon. He would have shown

exactly how sea-mist smothers and pearls
the white beach, how it dissolves the known world.

Sea demands constant attention,
like a child with a tantrum in a shopping aisle.

How can you possibly concentrate on low-fat yoghurt
and tins of Portuguese sardines in this infernal din?

The bay is on three sides of us, breathing deeply,
and although I might want to examine say

a tiny spider hanging from an invisible thread,
or lick a finger to thread cotton through the eye of a needle,

or enjoy the yellow stamens of a white camellia,
I find it impossible. I am too frail, too small to cope

with the enormity of ocean day in day out.
It is too big a scope. Even the clouds are huge.

You watch the weather come in over the roof of the bay,
the squall that crumples the water, anvil clouds telling of thunder.

There I go again, you see, it’s impossible to write about minutiae -
wheelbarrows, chickens, the cold at the heart of a candle flame.

A white pebble, say, that would be marvellous to consider,
but no, I would do better to produce a Wagnerian tale of afterlife.

If you keep a goldfish in a small bowl, he stays small,
but if you transfer him to a pond he grows to fit his habitat.

I am eating as much chocolate as possible, so I am solid enough
to be anchored to the earth, so the Force 9 north-easterly,

or a prevailing south-westerly won’t blow me over the cliff,
down into the greedy sea, where I’ll be swallowed alive.