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

A plain square house on the edge of the New Forest – set well back from the main road.  A spacious bedroom overlooking a large lawned garden dotted with orchard trees and flower-beds.  A gracious uncluttered breakfast-room full of light from tall, large-paned windows.  And good food.  Until its owners moved on, I would occasionally return there for the pin-drop quiet, the blackness of the nights that always dazzled me.  Away from the flare of traffic – onto heathland or down some quiet lane, only a faint Southampton glow competes with the moon and Milky Way for a clear night sky; it always loses.  Sometimes, in the late or early hours, I’ve walked the one-mile straight road back from my friends’ house – blind but for starlight – and let my thoughts be sucked out into the void through all those tiny holes in the so close but untouchable blue-black velvet: a brief adjournment of the self – the child’s voice in the apple tree – a quick fix at the end of the day; no less experienced for being illusion; for being in the sure and certain knowledge that back in the real world, a switch will always click like an arthritic joint and billions of polarised pieces of mentality will jump back to a shabby attention on their circuit boards to say Game Over.  

                                                the moths too must rest.
                                                While I’m away, I open
                                                 the windows wider