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

You must sit

in the center of each oval room.
It is fine
if others pass between you and
the curving canvasses. You will soon see
through anyone
in the way. The water gardens

fill two long rooms
between impression and expression and
fill you until you breathe
blue and violet shadow;
light, fish, tree and mirror,
every grass and pad.

You must sit a long time
to know the smallest thing that crawls
from the brilliant soup: a fish
with feet, a frog with fins, a snake
with wings, a snail with lungs,
an old French man who speaks

after the thunder of war fills
two oval rooms with color, surprise; simplicity
and silence.
After years of shells and hunger?
plenty of purple, nothing
too discernable, just the tranquillity of breathing,

no boundary
no border
no violent decision

everything growing.

*

Three ways of seeing:

Walk from the center of the room toward the middle of a canvas let peripherals help you you can see the whole painting until you believe all those hues barely move and they are everything you can see

Do not stop turning in the center of the room each panel passes the way love pauses and them grows once more pause turn another way continuing colours are the reason you must sit down

Walk a room periphery one way the length of the story of ponds of color of banks of willows knots of grass of water weed of spatterdock of this thing growing every evolution all possibility
color

*

People who cry here

have been sitting a long time.
None cry until they decide they must go. Surprised
they understand all still water
that eddies inside belly and brow and groin
and heart: wet broken growing alive everything
swimming from color into light
from remembrance into reflection and now
they must leave a place
they recognise as home
just as they are ready to go.