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

1.

Every death has its own peculiar song
& these are the ones that visit me at 5.40 an
for Arthur Jacobs           Mick Jagger singing
“Send me dead flowers by the mail”
Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye        Erev Shele Shoshanim

And now we are out in Essex,
so far out we have passed through places
that are London only by an act of will
or a leap of the imagination;
out in these marginal lands
just contemplating them
requires a suspension of disbelief
or schadenfreude

This is the East of the East
where the winds blow their ramshorn music
endlessly all the way from Russia
and what there is        flat & wet,
well named Rainham

2.

How fitting a Glasgow boy should die in Spain
a place he loved and home to the Iberian farmers
who settled Britain translating forest to landscape
The Fortunate Isles         haven to many tribes of wanderers

The English can never understand that Scotland
faces West to America or East to the Baltic
that ‘South’ is France or the Mediterranean

That in the Middle Ages Scots scholars
wandered Europe       Prague Toledo & Malaga
where Jew met Moor as poet and scholar
till Isabella’s jealousy drove them out

& reason slept in Spain as Goya warned
everything slept in Spain for 300 years
till Franco brought the Beast to life
& Lorca paid the ancient price for being different

3.

So now you have gone back to drink sweet wine
in the secret squares where Yiddish poets meet
& we are gathered together in the East

Ashes to ashes         dust to dust
returned to the hand of the Potter

Let the voice of the wind       Ruach
cancel your unaccomplished vows