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

This is the big house
we come back to
and come back to
                             with advice and maps

though at first we go nowhere
just stare at the list of all the rooms

we know they're endless.

We'll find the high hall where the
solar system is set out, all its
parts working together, the huge
and the tiny, hauling our days
through their paces like a
stiff honest clock
with the sun at its heart the
biggest engine of all

                                 and we'll
be astonished - unfailingly
each time we are astonished -
at how that engine has poured itself
for us, goes on pouring, for
algae squeezing light into oil, for
leaves and trees and great webbed ferns
of rainforests digesting down
into coal, for the grass
that will be our bones

                                 astonished again -
at the little planet which is ours,
which grows as we think
it made us possible,
has learned to mind and mend itself
for us, its minerals and gases, carbon
and nitrogen and oxygen and the rest
crowding down into the earth
to sprout out again
in every green thing, rain
becoming rivers becoming oceans
becoming rain:

                                     we'll promise
to take care of our mother
now that she's old and tired and worn.

Then we'll be gone
as we please -
where food chains make such
splendid jigsaws, every
piece in place, all the
plants and creatures
consenting to be lunch for
other plants and creatures,
phytoplankton for zooplankton,
zooplankton for mussels and
grey mullet and whales -
what's left for the worms?

Last of course we'll adjourn
to what we like best: to the
queer, broken monsters
whose names - deinonychus,
rhamphorhynchus, styracosaurus - are
spells,
who keep safe the lost gaps
the dragons left, who stepped aside
so that we could come.

                               In secret we'll think, wasn't
this where they were heading
from way back, aren't they
perfected, like the best toys
by what they've endured, the
millennia-long exchange of stuff,
molecule by molecule, in which
nothing is lost and everything,
by the use earth has made of them,
the torque and grind and bearing down
of the stony blankets they were
wrapped in, by their long wait
to be found and mended

                                        and doesn't it still seem
to want an end, this story
we hold to like a promise, when we're
swept out at six through tall doors
to the waiting dark

                              where a moon
shrinks as it climbs - clear
of roofs and cries - intent
on what it can't reach

and - deaf as those nobler
parents we were sure would run
calling for us through the
night garden - blameless
constellations tilt and burn.