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

('My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold
The truth, as Cabinets inclose the gold . . .'
                                                            John Bunyan)

1

days of rain, last of the year

our children play games in which
well-known securities are rehearsed:
'I am the small puppy
belonging to the mother dog'

a dullness
not reached by Mozart, dope or sex
approximates despair

my poems have been too full
of your absence for years

31.12.75.


2

storm in the tree-tops
the sea's great bass

those correspondences
one tires of

won't let you be

great rushing wind
batters the mind
wind, not winde
on the castle-top

take
       oh take them
in the wind's wide mouth

dull words
of dull passion

spat out
            scattered

on the marshy ground
north of Lewes

2.1.76.


3

today I wish
not to describe a feeling
nor circumscribe a mood
(intangibly connected with a loss of self)
but simply to report
from where I stood

'in blank amazement
before the unknown territory of you
enveloped in an endlessly spreading
milky mist'

                        years ago
in the distance of a room
your dark eyes, dark hair
wet from washing, pushed back
and falling from behind the ears

only today I understood 
in the words of a Japanese novelist
how your beauty
penetrates my ignorance

10.1.76.


4

'Welcome,
black night' —
I welcome you

not because you
purge in sleep
the images of day

but as you contain
what lies
deepest in me

you are its 
key
and mirror, too —


so I was that boy, 12 years old
slipping from his parents' house,
who ran naked through the rain
to stand beneath the broken 
school-house roof
 
                             where a spout
gushed cold on his stomach,
quivering sex
                      and rolled
in the school-yard pools like a dog
releasing its own
                          secret delight
in blackness and pouring rain

26.1.76.
(after a song of John Dowland)


5
not black but colour
is a key

not 'key'
             but door
not 'door'
                but gulf

Joan Miro's
blue abyss
'free of all associations with the earth'

out of which
through a yellow curtain
a hawk grabbed me
from the edge of sleep

and carried me
to where I could gaze
up into the heart of day itself

my own heart
caught in the waves
of longing and fear,
not daring to acknowledge
what I had seen —
                                night
that stands behind day

lacking in courage
to give myself up

'small blue patch
                         in a limitless void'

1.2.76.
 

6

'wing,
bird-wing,
arch in the smoke'

one feather
I picked up,
perfect
grey curve,
yellow flash,
blown at my
feet
below the sea-wall

I was not thinking
of where I was,
grey curve
of ocean,
an eyelid's flash

'wing,
bird-wing,
arch in the smoke'

(homage to Johannes Bobrowski)