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

At the bottom of a hill in Montmartre
where you look up to the church and
the crawling cable cars is a signpost
which directs you to the Musée d’Art Naïf.

Above it there is always a small halo
of blue sky or if it rains the rain falls
in straight rods of silver and the winds
blow around it in perfect circles of
whistling breath and nearby someone sings
through a window which is not quite closed.

There, if you walk in the direction the sign-
post shows, past small shops that look as though
they are used, saying Bonjour to the people
who use them, you are glad to be in Montmartre
in clean air looking for the Musée d’Art Naïf.

And you will find, where the rain stops and
there is a smell of sunshine, a small building
which is not labelled but has two galleries
of paintings and a well-behaved sheep which
baas quietly from a pen in the wet-scrubbed
foyer beside a turnstile, a tiny cafe and
a ticket lady with an early-morning face.

In the gallery d’Art Naif the pictures are
arranged in countries and you can walk through
Europe spending an hour in Czechoslovakia.
And every portrait looks like someone
and there are families working in fields
or in farms among animals with familiar faces
and angels come and go in the Garden of Eden
where the sun shines in the middle of the sky
and you can see each leaf plainly on every tree.

And on certain weekdays a crocodile of children
invade the Musée d’Art Naïf to baa the dozing
sheep awake and run among the portraits
and the animals and the angels coming and going
in the sunshine in the Garden of Eden.

And when they leave, the silence in the Musée
d’Art Naïf in the middle of Montmartre on an
ordinary morning is like the silence of the
world on the seventh day of Creation when
everything is astonished at what it has become.