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

I. Christmas Lantern

Such flim-flam: a hutch of crumbling card
And the light’s composure. Still Talisman,

I think of nights your lucencies beguiled,
While the house rocked to the soft, blundering guns.

I set my heart upon your heraldries,
Where snow lies faultless to a cobalt sky,

Counting your shaken stars, adrift on paths
Diminishing among your vivid pines.

Frail monstrance, with an old anticipation
I set you here above my sleeping children.

The branched reindeer at the huddled bridge,
The simple house, offering her candled windows:

For their eyes now, your most immaculate landscape
And all the coloured rituals of love.

II. The Village Minstrel

There, boxed hugger-mugger,
A few sad fictions,
Lost grammars, dying bibles.

And Clare, in scuffed half-roan,
Blue tributary stains
Wandering the marbled boards.

‘To Dr. Darling, M.D.,
With the author’s best respects
And most grateful remembrances.’

December, eighteen twenty-seven.
Those rented Helpston acres:
A freehold tenement of words.

I hold his winter gift:
A light between each darkness.
Who list presume to Parnasse Hill?

I search the engraved eyes.
Who could wish him less
Than his own inscription?

On my reliquary shelf
His undefeated gold
Takes to this latter sunlight.

III. Marbles

They lurk in unfrequented corners,
A milky Venus, banded Jupiter,

Their planetary motions and disguise
Most adept at eluding Time’s removals.

This cold and crystalline survivor
Invites a slight clairvoyance:

Cracked asphalt, warm to the hand,
A blur of birdsong and white flowers,

A summer child, making and breaking
His solitary, erratic ring.

Taw and alley skip and tinkle;
An old blood-brotherhood re-forms,

Where all the lost and pretty dancers
Play the light music of the spheres.

Emblem and scene: indissoluble.
A twist of sunlight at the core.