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

Hostel rooms don't boast, but this one did,
lit by the cool sunroof of a rainbow.
Its tin beds, chariots of sublimating peace.
A room of cantilevered kindness, rid
of sock stench by pink cyclamen. A show home
to grab the dropped out, a new lease
on death for remembered bourgeois guile.
A light sun-dried glimpse of caged doves
released my soul on strings above tile
skies. I slept, adrift from past loves.

The Old Quarter of Corfu Town confounds
the day-glow tourist, hides behind washing
on spicery balustrades. Ink-jet welling
shadows fuse across the cobbles. No sounds
can stir. But in my dream the 'English Swing',
Venetian smock, and loud French dressing,
all put on a single face. A Greek mask. Unmanned
by sin and sun. A visage dipped in cricketing lore,
Yorkshire tea, and the pomp of a good brass band.
Was that him, hanging or banging a door?

Pale as a jailer, hung on varicose arms,
a crucified horse, installed between
one tubular bed and its twin brother?
His familiar voice, born to be bellicose,
bore a youth hostel warden's Ryvita-clean
humour, packing lunch, talking weather.
The 'spearers of game' would not smooch girls
around here. We rested assured. Booted
against the abrasive limestone foothills,
we trekked the oleanders' line to Alepou.

No-one invested with life can resist
this fourteen kilometre hike. Pelekas.
It hauls out your prestigious mind, grey
on the pumice, dead, and never once missed.
The body's a living cell of the land. Because
of autumn's glut, plum, walnut, grape, all day
spill to hand, in the fields near Kokini's well.
If prickly pear spines tear my page to dust
the poem will write itself on air, and carousel
to the speedy swallows' dry mud nest.