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

‘The gods are always there to show their power.
They help us humans in their marvellous ways:
They send us dreams; and they it is provide

The oracles for our uncertainties
And remedies for our ill-health. In fact
They care for us and for our metropoles.’

Too outré even for an emperor,
Such words, we think, who’ve never felt at home
(Nor ever will do) in the universe.

I hope the sparrows roosting in the shrub
Above my window (presences only leaked
By droppings on the sill) sleep more than I.

They may include the hen I saw today
Pick up a small white feather in her bill
And make herself look like an elderly

Colonel, no doubt retired — as now I am.
Perhaps the sparrow did it to amuse.
Perhaps some bird-god does look after us

In such things of no consequence — though I’m
The last to under-rate the trivial
Or comic. ‘Like an ill-roasted egg,’ I say,

Shifting the ovoid in the simmering pan
As I prepare an early breakfast, struck
With the Swan’s penchant for the homely trope.

The water rattles in the grid outside
Some moments after one’s turned off the tap.
A poet’s work against the scale of Rome?

This is the dismal week when Auden died.
He certainly was hooked up to the gods
As far as we’re concerned. Though he himself —

Needing a decent drink, then off to what
More usually was maybe uncertain sleep —
I daresay felt mortal like the rest of us.

And really more than holiness, it’s booze
And cigarettes make bearable our lives.
Then cut them short; and leave us to the gods.