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

Engraved on the blue leather, four motifs.

Firstly, High Noon.
Here in Beirut
no sunbaked Western saunter, but our team
has found three Roman arches and now breaks for lunch.
We chew on pitta bread; our toecaps sift
spent bullets, spikes of bone. Which sect did these workmen,
these busy dust-smoothers, fight for?
Sects tightly packed like cheeses, each one reeking.

Rye Whiskey.
“We have watered our horses in Helicon"
and in those Southern woods
where through illegal moonshine stills
the brown spring water trickles, not explaining.
Laurelled in folk memory
as holy wells are honoured in other countries,
that muttering water draws my ragged thought,
sporadic votive offering which exiles send
to the green place they've turned their backs on.
Shadbush, black oak, dogwood,
red-crested treepecker, bobcat,
inch-high pink shellflowers by the railroad every April,
remember us who have abandoned you.

The Deck of Cards.
No poker here, or other Western games.
Here the cards sort like crystals under a microscope
while the inhabitants of this city play patience, patience.
Too many are dead for a full stacked-up house.

The Book of Names.
Insert your own for Tex's oblique scribbles.
So I proclaim
four people listed, of whom three have died.
I, the remaining quarter,
lift up my gaze like a glass wall to the sun.
Walls can stay silent in many languages.

The whole of Tex Ritter's guitar strap.
Six thousand miles from here, in rural Texas –
a small museum – the pure strap hangs
framed in a velvet case, shielded from prodders,
its sea-blue leather shaped like a giant claw
lumbering up from the lower Gulf
all tired simplicities. It doesn't sing
or play, it is a weapon waiting
with a terrible innocence we wanderers cannot face.