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

Among the garçons edging the High Table
Of The Success Society were several pimply youths
Who never making prefect had a lot of yeast
In them; a funny thing, one older member said,
No matter what the Götterdämmerung,
How black and stiff each green indicative,
Some bunch of brazen never-readers
Turns up, shouting ‘This is Now, this Shift
Is What There Is and I am its Vizier.’
So much for tiredness and the vellum robing it,
So much for digits dripping down their columns,
For Third Worlds, Total Exclusion Zones
And bucklings of the plates of History -
A small moustache is working at the world
And won’t be interrupted - you will hear it
When it croaks its beating need.
                                                     Do you think
They knew they lived in an Age of Eloquence
Who were arguing with stars through fiery glass,
Who took perfection of the artist’s form
For granted, working instead on how steam fell
And rose in tubes and how the ugly module
Of just seventy years might blaze a golden rose
For Demos?
                     And in the Age of Epigram
When an out-of-kilter cummerbund
Or a wrong caesura in hexameters
Was most of what was worrying in art
Some brutal primitive was marketing
A colossal apparatus raising myth
To high symbolic shouting.
                                            No-one
May escape the garish present; it brings
You face to face with the Napoleon
In your mirror; your very nervous system
Is fundamentalist and knowing death
Instinctively it outlaws it,
Imagining committees to sit on
And hunting lodges still at planning stage,
A full obituary of accomplishments.
They raised their glasses then to fame and let
Those parvenues take up the light: the night
Was young, just like the world, and there was
Room in The Success Society for all.
In another part of town a curious band
Had come together, seemingly not talking,
Just looking at large folios of battered blue
And calling continuously for further drinks.
Someone named them to us, The Failure Society,
Pretty important people once whose books
Of hopelessness brought royalties flooding in,
Whose visits to mosquito coasts caused wars
Or burning of the staple crops.
                                                  For years
They’d tinkered with the liturgy of hope,
Adapting social engineering to
The real face of evil, so they sat
At dinner parties on the host’s right hand
And sauced the duller hates of millionaires
With rich lapsarian links: they didn’t like it
When opponents asked them why the wickedness
Of worlds went hand in hand with personal
Success or what those prophets really meant
Who, choked on locusts and sand apparitions,
Called down the fire of heaven on Babylon
Or Rome or Rickmansworth.
                                              How wicked was it
To seek promotion in a PR firm
Or grow the largest marrow on the lot?
But now society had phased them out
And found it missed them - that tone, that dying fall,
That lyrical susurrus of despair
In novels or in sonnets lent relief
To people keen to learn a sense of style -
What could it be, that artful knowingness,
But the ancient acid of defeat, the sun
Which shone on tombs and Paradise alike?
So now behold the veterans convened
Again, as in the old days, swapping stories
Of why the Nobel Panel loved the dark
And where the flood of evil had its source.
They nominated one, a velvet bard
Too long in exile from extravagance,
To make the keynote speech.
                                                Tonight, he said,
I shall recall a golden age; I shan’t
Speak of our exile in the provinces
Or how we washed the lavatories for Stocks
And Shares and ate the dead sea fruit of doubt.
My treatise is a poem, visionary
And full of an hermetic indolence;
To give it extra unction I shall make
Its title French, ‘Le Jardin Suspendu’,
Or ‘Hanging Gardens’ to the journalists -
As rich as Salammbô, as high above
The ordinary as Sardanapalus,
It covers death with that anticipation
We know as music when we lie awake
Chalked by the moon on bed and pillowslip:
Nothing of the vernacular will underpin
The picture, just a hocket of the desperate
Adding another note to consequence.

And he began. ‘The king was sad and so
He ordered gods, not just his courtiers,
To raise a garden in the sky where plants
Might be the grander close to sun and rain.
And standing tiptoe when the king approached
Would point him into Heaven with a touch
Or leaf or stamen.
                               A flying garden would
Have pleased him more, but this interpolation
Picked up the interstellar gossip and
The king could eavesdrop on the voices of
The dead, who told him men would not live long
But work much evil while they were on earth.
Saddened by this the king addressed himself
To welfare and the public good and works
Of art, to gates and roads and aqueducts.
He was not heard in Heaven and the stars
Shone on regardless.
                                    ‘If God could stoop,’ the king
Was told, ‘He’d preen the smallest fly for fun.’