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

The ship is the land.
Reason would have you believe
beauty like this could not exist.
Here the usual beatitudes do not suffice.
Grace is clumsy in comparison,
sleek is overbuilt.
Even names, Norheimsund or
Tysse sit like emeralds in gold.
The sweep of the strakes
is an overlay of fjords, keel-wood
still grows on the steep slopes.
Prow and stern are glaciers
reaching out from this homeland.
The entwined animals carved
on each intricate flank
are dialects, different speech
from the same tongues.
This ship would sail any midnight sun.
Oar-benched with saga heroes
every destination is Valhalla.
The ship is the land.
The land is perfect.

This is a world of the everyday,
the routine of serving, table-waiting,
trying to isolate words from an endless
waterfall of Monday to Friday gossip.
Beauty has been overpainted;
functionality is the prime-mover.
Routine becomes the good teacher,
everything finds its own place.
Old language fades into the background.
New vocabulary becomes the familiar
taste on the tongue. Everyday is explained,
even tog stogger ikkje mot Voss
is clear and now necessary.

Yet behind the functionality the ghost
of beauty haunts this world.
Form fits function, people fit the land.
Mountains still stand up to clear air.
Even through the smoke of factory and furnace.
Tramp-steamers trudge the fjords
between cliff and glacial tongue.
And everywhere, no matter how mundane,
has a viking ship in its soul.
This then is what remains; a language rarely
used, recollections of events imagined
for they could never have been real,
friends who were better to you
than you could be to them.

The ruins need to be preserved,
each viewing shows more erosion.
Cobwebs are memories, no more than this,
insubstantial traps to hold you
until you are devoured.

The broken deck and missing limbs
indicate what could have been.
Each plank is a work-permit, each bench
a future that now cannot occur.
What has gone is gone.
The ship is the land.

I have run her aground.

Though all else was lost there remain
the grave-goods, the photographs, the language
that still appears in dreams.
Like the old vikings
I make occasional raids.

Oslo this year, the west coast next.
And always the people I knew young
resurface; now middle-aged
they pass unrecognized on the street.
There are no ice-birds made of glass,
no reindeer skins. Memory must
carry these things always.
They are points on the horizon.

For the love of viking ships
I am buried at sea.