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

Such gorgeous flares light up the sky
Climbing their own trajectories to drop over and watch us
Dancing ladies with their eyes arms and legs regarding us

I recognised your vivacious smile

Which is also the apotheosis of all my Berenices whose
           flowing locks are comets' tails
Those double-gilt dancers belong to all times and races
Suddenly bearing children that only have time to die

Such handsome explosions
Though wouldn't it be grand if there were more
If there were millions more fully alive and apposite as words
           in a book
Though these are so lovely it's as if life came out of death

But if there were loads more it would be still more lovely
I still consider them to be like Beauty surrendering herself
           before completely vanishing
It seems I've been invited to some feast resplendent with
           bright lights
A banquet given for the earth
Whose pale famished mouths gape open
Earth starves and here comes Balthazar's cannibal orgy

Who'd have thought one could be so carnivorous
That you'd need all that fire to roast a corpse
That's why the air smells of braised flesh which is my God not
           at all disagreeable
It would be exquisite if the sky ate with the earth
But it only swallows souls
It's one way of starving itself
Content with juggling multicoloured flares

I've sunk right into the honey of this war with all my company
           spread out along these long intestinal trenches
Crackling flames continually announce my presence
I've excavated my bed and now flow and branch into a thousand
           streams that gush everywhere
Though in the front-line trench I'm still all over the place or rather
           about to be everywhere
I've begun this process for the sake of centuries to come
It will take longer to achieve than the flight of Icarus

I leave to the future this tale of Guillaime Appollinare
Who fought out the war and now could be anywhere
In lucky towns behind the lines
In the rest of the universe
In the dead entangled in the wire
In women cannon horses
At the zenith the nadir the 4 cardinal points
In the terrible intensity of the night before battle

Doubtless it could be more beautiful
Were I to suppose that all I'm part of
Was also part of me
But this couldn't happen
As I'm everywhere right now but still the real me