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

57    For Barry, died May 9 2000

Do sheets of the dead-in-waiting still move
on their chest, lift with the tiniest breath?
yours swayed faintly, as though your heart, your love,
echoed in veins, blurring the edge of death;
eyes shut, lashes down, they trembled beneath
my attentive gaze, the lashes flickered
like a ghostly fairy piano of grief
my eyes were troubling; I kissed your forehead,
nerving for the cold, cool as white china,
your temple become marble, ravages
of thorns under thin hair lovely and finer
to me than tidied under powder; the age
will mourn a poet’s death; eyelids, I’ll kiss,
nose, lips, with pollen dust of tenderness.

58

You sang in the midden, beauty springing
from your day’s conversation, gift of song
unstoppable, distress and bliss singing
descant and tune, it was anger of wrong
and joy of right, plaintive among your starres,
plaiting accord and discord, beauty wins
over dead wars like the single fires
girdling the sky, and they are all one
with us, in stages of living and dying,
changing in the blossom of a speck
to a billion flowers as I, unwitting,
split from you by an atom’s check
mate by breath. We’ll meet in the circling air
and when unhooped from earth, ignite our star.

59    Red Roses

Out from the train, black night rain, his face dull
from journeying, Nye is an explosion
of smiles. Home music on, he is a twirl
of fourteen months on feet like clock hands
speeding through time, his fingers shaking high
on invisible castanets, dancing
like birdsong after guns, the birds, like Wye,
inborn with rhythm. We’re firelight watching
his small moving flame, torch once set alight
out of milky mire to mosses, now passed
on, a secret code we’re spelling out but
not the mystery. An unwelcome guest
at your hijacked funeral, my flowers’
truthful tongues, the only moving fire.

60    By Cockfield Fell

Clouds snag across May skies, life persists, rain
feeding the green incense, ordinariness
blooms, the coming child’s blinking light disdains
fears, the bud unfurling to witnesses
of fingers, feet, penis, a boy promised -
In the gullies, flowers friends argue about,
childhood names clash, ragwort, campion, red
and white, and what’s that? eggs & bacon we shout,
lady’s smock, dock, pignut (or cow parsley?)
sorrell (vinegar leaves?) dead nettle, vetch,
field orchid, speedwell, stitched with daisy,
buttercup, primrose, cowslip, violet;
ascension of beauty, time’s embroidery,
larks, thrushes, dunnocks, the air’s poetry.

61

When we touched, palm to palm, arm on arm, our
souls passed straight through our bodies, the touch learnt
by foretouch in the school of loving for
lost souls still at the desk with can’t and won’t,
how our bodies taught us simplicity
of giving, no self in the bed, our souls
passed through, all gates open, writing our story
in the book of atoms; there in cold coals
our hot fires will be read, quarks and sub-sparks
met and exchanged histories from the bang
of time, our wavelengths were singing the talk
of love into silence, and your eyes sang
with the choir of it afterwards; when we
touched, it sprang back, a reflex of that sea.