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

1. Johannes Ockegheim

A Scandinavian Airlines DC9
whines over in the mist, courting the one
chance in a million, touching earth on time.
There's no danger looking at the sun today,
it's white like a new coin. And in the silence
I press a switch — no not a ghost
 
but fear and recognition across five
centuries. You cry out against
the black lake, obscura tenebrarum.
A space where even electricity fails.
Last night I dreamt of cancer in the thigh
and the terror of an absent-minded surgeon's knife.

2. Hieronymus Bosch

The screen crackles. A Cambodian family
still-life: caught in a shell-blast.
The damned always outnumber the saved.
Nothing moves, the camera's rock-steady.
Hell is all surface, torture by colour,
an eternity of eyes that can't close.

A marvellous statement of the obvious
is what you painted, knowing the ocean depth,
like the subconscious, is all law and order.
I press a switch and the screen is blank again.
I still have pre-electric dreams.
I am a wooden saint tortured by cracks.

3. Robert Henryson

Sub Specie aeternitatis,
a reading lamp like a prison searchlight.
Humanity feeling its way along a wall
inside of hell? outside of heaven?
Your universe has a double tongue, speaking
of the winter behind a sweating judge's brow.

'Rycht marvelous a cockle multitude' —
the mare, the swallow, the solitary saved,
true outsiders. A hand from the dark
swivels the light in my eyes: confess! confess!
I waken. The light's been on all night.
Now in the morning it hardl