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

i      The bell tips its small horizon,
       a metal shiver of freedom.
       Slates are discarded,
       chalks roll their dust.
       Beyond the school gate
       a green wind hurries the grass,
       the tide’s bright glaze.

       Sleeves flapping, you skitter
       down the street. No doors
       between you and island-light,
       long shores, June’s
       wide-eyed blue: you could fly.

       Above Stromness, the brae –
       a humpback whale arching with joy.

ii     A racked adolescence:
       breath in instalments,
       the rasp, the hack, the pain.
       Now you are a thin flame
       in a long white ward.

       Wrecks redden in Scapa Flow,
       thirst with rust. You make
       your berth between sheet and ale.

       Daffodil women sail the street
       with April in their arms.
       They float through your beer jar,
       lissom as porpoises,
       unattainable as stars.

iii     Muirburn: heather on fire.
       You reach for Woodbines, Burns.
       Words fall through your parched sky,
       fulmars, pintails, terns.

iv     Sleet-grey walls, metal stairs.
       A fan-heater by your kitchen table.
       A cigarette wags its shadow,
       writes in small cairns.
       Poem by poem, the islands
       sing their circles on your page.

v     You hang your star in a pane,
       the one small window on the sea.
       What does it frame?
       A few salt inches.
       Red gravel clearing its throat.
       Rowing boats: halved fruit
       peeling yellow, serge, white.

vi     Outside your death I find you,
        a splinter of light
        still lodged among stones,
        the swerving grey mile of Stromness.

        Storm-coloured groove,
        your life ran its course
        flagstone by flagstone
        from museum to ale-house,
        lifeboat to kirkyard, its sides
        whetted by Atlantic winters,
        the emery of your passing.

vii     I walk past alleyways,
        the ghosts of sweet shops,
        sherbet and claggam,
        Ferry Road, Creig’s Pier
        where a boy that is you
        dangles a line, dances
        a sillock’s tin flash.