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

The novices’ noses, unlike those of Neanderthal man, are not bulbous enough to warm this December air before it numbs the lungs, being so nipped with mist and dank leaf-smell that one is imbibing a sort of decadent iced liqueur of deepest autumn.

One by one, on various paths and from behind different bushes, our group of eight congregate, all heavily muffled. We have been summoned to a haiku no ginko in the Japanese garden of Holland Park, Kensington. Tito, who has announced himself to be our soshi (whatever that is) bids us each on their own go search for three-line prey. We widen our eyeballs to the frozen scene.

Ducks stand on the pond ice, on one leg, well out to the middle. One has seen decoy ducks that were more animated. Nothing moves. Dawn is postponed till nearly noon.

reflected from ice
in the stone lantern
a glimmer of light

Between eleven-thirty and one o’clock there is an abbreviated day. A gleam - no, not a gleam, but the merest tinge of sulphur - is added to the fog’s spectrum. It is enough. A duck lowers a leg, turns its head, skates. Tits and sparrows flutter a bit, there is a pigeon. A rabbit lopes forwards three half-hearted hops, nibbles a few limp blades, then retreats to its bush again. A squirrel does not ‘keep off the grass’. The shape of a fox faintly russets the gap between hedge and hedge.

coins in the pond -
more glow in the copper
than the silver ones

The soshi thinks we have had enough time and calls us together to sit on a groundsheet spread over the frosted grass under a bare willow tree. “We will share now, won’t we?” he proposes. He unfolds a large card on which are to go the verses after we have picked them over and found a way to link them into a rensaku. The person appointed to record them takes off his gloves.

Over the arched Japanese bridge the purposeful stride of a woman police officer, talking into her walkie-talkie. She stands over us. We explain about the need to sit down on the frost in the middle of a December fog and write our poems. Tito drinks out of his thermos flask to show it is just that. She reports back to base, tells them she’s had a good look at us, and that what we are doing may seem an offence to the park gardener, but doesn’t threaten public safety.

At two, the day -  if it ever was a day - comes to an end. The ducks are back on one leg again. The ice on the pond and the fog in the air freeze into each other’s embrace.

the bamboo scarer -
its clack, pause and clack
reassuring