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

A dead woman
screams down Wall Street.

Ash smudged aliens
climb into her bus

and go home.
It had been a glorious morning

with no clouds. Now
everyone staggers alone, flees

open mouthed into sidewalk shops
of glads. A stream of dusted strangers

floods the cleanest places in town.
After such explosions

the final rain
muddies the ashen oranges, yes

all their bright pyramids:
abandoned.

*

There is a coliseum of the dead
with their mouths chewed out

in spite of their songs no one can stop.
No one has a map,

we have forgotten where we built it.
There is a stadium of piles

of limbs of limbs of limbs
that hold up the city and

the mouths that sound like traffic
or bombs

or nothing we have ever heard before.

*

We will gather them
from every country and every side.

From our lectern, we hold their terror
up like an infant. Look

they are ready to sing
but we do not care who they are

or for the song or the disappearance
of their names. We gather them to give ourselves

a reason to feed the demanding child.
Remember their mouths are gone.

To begin our bombs we build our book
from our precious babe under the star shower of ash,

the heads of huge Buddhas that slide off
at the neck. The birds slip out

ellipse the air
and go.

A body suspends in the air,
a gingko leaf,

a spontaneous swan,
and it is begun with self aggrandizing prayer

to pile the piles of wailing
upon the piles of others.

*

I will not forget
that rocks half a world away crack too

and that placid, huge,
figures slip suddenly out

of their niches in mountainsides,
niches of walls,

niches of smuggled opium, niches
of beautiful birds

in a land of curtained women
who will wail face
or no face by the time

this is all done and the fruits
are clean in the cities again
and the towers reflect

again and all the flags are flown
until they can fly no longer

and they inevitably fray
and fall.