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

The Herr Burgomeister is mining his teeth. Keep pressure
Up in all the bourgeois organs, this is God’s sanity,
          Blowing air at calibrated lengths,
          Voiding Heaven for South Germany.

You will die not young, nor very old, but dusty on top:
Pleasures in the Palmengarten, the brass taste of logic
          And the graveyards holding a pedal
          For the repeated Fs of Jesus.

Darkness and the smell of wax snuffed out! Zum Grünen Anker
Where they ride on seas of blond wine, tasting self like sugar —
          The masked hours moused by my fat cat
          With all of Sunday to come home to!

It is forever before the cataclysm, hermits
Are boiling the state, but one gentle mad poet discounts
          The furor teutonicus with swan-
          polished sails on the Swabian dusk.

Tiptoe through the granaries and the old lead workings —
This is the bridgework of a Protestant Book of Beauty,
          The flowers Luther leered at, types of
          Forgiveness for aunts and abbatoirs.

Being translated into pretty Music Programme vowels,
A morning canto for Anglo-Saxon reasonableness —
          The thundering of bells overhead,
          The rendering of praise overheard.

Storm cones, conical icons of the middle element,
Hang like mad sausages in the organ-builder’s brain-box,
          A wind to swell out Dorotheas
          And cool our diary-keeping cousins.

Witches are baking, hares sleeping in the stubble, ravens,
Black, unglücklich, cawing for the chance of further mischief;
          Now time is turned to drops of music,
          Apollo on posaune and gedackt.

The pebble in the stream is run from by the sun. Listen!
One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.
          The air is arguing with itself,
          The gods are in the room, eavesdropping.