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

of hurry, the grey and furry hare that is witness
to the speed
of desperation; over-stretched long ears too stiff
for listening, slipping his harelip - hurriedly -
into every conversation. Slim beast with eyes
built out of plaster of panic,
the never here, never there hare, the always
scared, never sure of sacred hare, the always shrieking
always streaking hare, with his GP-prescribed pills,

pinks and blues, clutched under his hairy armpits.
The ones are his sleeping pills, the others
for ills forgotten. All he remembers is
he has to hurry along with them. And so carefully
carry the pinks and blues as if they were
the boys and girls hidden in his testicles. Pink
or blue? Which are the ones for sleeping,
which for worrying? He knows

he should ask his GP again, or risk the hurt
of a second opinion, but with hounds abounding,
and everywhere-foxes, and horses a-whinnying,
and huntsmen a-shouting, his dropped-out-of-sight
disease means less than a thorn
in a desensitised sole. No, far more painful
the knowledge that at the end of each sprint
revelation
will always remain that one-more-inch out of reach.

Look, the golden age of hurry hare; see, his lips
flattened against his brain in the face of speed,
the brain split by panic’s shine; hear him, still
asking: which are the ones for sleeping, which
the ones I don’t-know-what-they’re-there-for?
Sweating, shivering all the way he has forgotten
the lay of his form. But inescapably there lies
- at the bottom of his anguished skull -
this harebrained dream of him

rescuing Snow-White.