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

                                              Every place shelters its own dream.
                                                                                Alfons Paquet

Every metaphor for silence
rudely thrown out and hushed up.
No steps crunch on the sand
of a dark summer path.
Woollen tongues have ground down
the village tales of simple souls.
No torrents of corn fall
from the feeding board into the big farm machine.
No shimmering dust dancing
that remembers:
back then, on the threshing floor.
I stood tall in the husk storm
and pitched down a cartload of wheat.
I pulled the horses’ collars
over their heads
and looked at them without any fear,
animals good as gold, gentle
as the sunsets outside
on the nettle path, barefoot in my clogs,
having slipped free of the world towards evening
above windrows, swallows' wings
were flitting low and lower over the earth.
Heaven only knows, look before you step, the end is coming,
the day of trouble is drawing near.
Young lady-in-the-green goes in sackcloth and ashes,
the blacksmith’s daughter, in whose
gardens you lived in your day.
What you knew, what I saw:
Old Mecklenburg, midland
pairs of storks, summer faces,
mirror images of mirror images
back to front in sharp silhouette
on the nightly enchanted Leizen lake,
bewitched on an overgrown byway.
All words have been lost with the things
which the big muncher-cruncher ate.

No farmyard gate creaks on its hinges,
no flywheel turns any more,
nothing crumples
where everything has long been smashed.
The crankshafts, the riddles -
scrap, scrap, scrap.