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

*

I share the accusations of the minute
I stand before the root of man and want its slaughter
My song is infidel, is twilight, is the moon
dripped with honey absent of herbs

The planet has cursed the sovereignty of all four limbs
The tissues have become sand-bars, involute mountains
that decline the sources of the Israelite offer

The matter of the living has become feminine ---
the horns of the heifer are hooks and the flesh they tackle
is the temple, stone upon stone, the cantilevers
that support the falling of descended skies

The air around me is a wife
O hand, throat, veil and astrolabe
It is her curse that I’ve stated

To the north there flies a kestrel
To the south there bleats a butchered ram

O man, man, you should murder inside you
where there are divinities you should fashion devils
and where there are devils you should walk among them
as a lamb rejoiced

*

as who could find or flame / as
a blue dwarf

as who’d know there’d be a witch
this place further from
Arcturus?

occupation’s simply all you own
thrown down
and put in wooden stalls

the land’s a life / a
damage
or an alteration

the sea throw of the muscle
how this has set a cage
and let each leg become a claw

mud or other calcined energy
the rich perform a sorcery
where the great grain of the cosm

flows its shadow onto coral
mists steam forever as requitted curse
the deadman barb themselves on branches

salt claims electrification
the single tunnel booms
there is the screaming of Pan

and Nessus

a rudder steered by Tammuz
to the crumbled tower