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

I

I quickly removed
this sort of arbitrary dressing

I regain myself
free
and without hope

like a bundle of sticks
or a stone

I glow

with the heat of the stone

which resembles the cold
against the body of the field

but I know the heat and cold

the frame of the fire

the fire

from which I see
the head

the white limbs.

II

At several points the fire pierces the dull side of the sky,
the side that I had never seen.

The sky which rises a little above the earth. The black brow.
I don’t know if I’m here or there,
                                                     in the air or in the rut.
Those are some fragments of air that I trample down like clods
of earth.

My life stops with the wall or starts again there where the wall
stops, with the sparkling sky. I don’t give in.

III

                                            My story will be the black branch
that forms an elbow in the sky.

The light of the blade

This grating glacier

expressing
the earth’s freshness

without breathing.

                                            Like paper flat upon this earth,
or a little above the earth,
                                            like a blade I cease breathing. The
night returns me to myself, for a moment, to speak of it.

          In place of the tree.
                                          In the clarity of the stones.

                                                     I have seen, all day long,
the dark blue beam thwarting the rising day
from reuniting us in the still light.

                            I walk in the glittering dust
which reflects us.

In the short and blue
breath
         of the clattering air

far from the breath

the air trembles and clatters.