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

To live aesthetically
“is to be spruce
in a glowing grassland,”
the poet died saying,
effaces his guarantees
to a canzone
of posterity’s fire,
all essence
begins with
A or a stump or stick,
a court
of exhumation
and a trick you made
with posters
of brief encounters,
that Seine
always crazy,
here in red suburbs
always expecting Provence
to be a Lady
when it was men
whom you proposed
to ally yourself with,
as a veteran blossom
ghost writes
the vellum’s dull gold
for praise,
and yet in cherry blossom
maid of New Orleans
a travelling priest
masked in a dress
of knowing death
is a drag,
“My parents
did not pardon
me, but left me
for a color T.V.”
that I was,
a seaweed professor
bought up my rites
after Genet,
working on a project
of a nuclear family
for popular theatre
with no circulation
for a silkworm humanist,
part-time irredentist
who pulled teeth
for men who spell
Nietzsche wrong
when in a gnat crowd
they buried civilization
under the right side
of a French librarian
turned barbarian,
for ten books were burned
then ten thousand,
so the mischance of civilization
made its realization
to express
in twelve terminal governments
and Reichstag horsemen
to revive the Latin tongue,
it was not the dance
of ill speech
or the legs of women
that made murder
a government chief character
witness but a hatred of
dung words, or pious verse
in childhood
that made an extra
good totalitarian
from a misunderstood
egalitarian,
the sunbathers
along the Rhinegold
singing so loud
on shy days
that the screaming child
who lost his mother
in a German chamber
that the profligate sky
reached profits
of a burghermaster
making new marks
saying, “I’m sorry
my Lutheran opinions
are not my own,
my orders are higher,
the State has made
me God,” blame Hegel
for Hitler’s breadth
or for Stalin’s breath perfume
1941, all I want is to serve
sherbet and Schubert,
as the son of David
armed with twenty centuries
of Haggia Sophia
watched time
in translation
(the Jews of Bulgaria
are safe!)
Dunkirk will not be forgotten
by German moral rearmament
and revanchism
is so passé
for the young boy
already on the Berlin wall
another eats a sauerkraut
over the head
of Rainer Fassbinder
hiding Rilke
from the seventy comrades
tortured in the camps,
Lidice is yellow
Escorial green
Buchenwald, neutral
Oradour, pink
Budapest, orange
in Oberammagau
Passion,
“the heart is there to
reform,” said the
Marbourg humanist
carrying Schiller
in his double breasted
always invested
in the state of man,
“Charm is disarming”
said the Vichy prince
of collaboration
between the arts,
to protect the blood line
of the Carolingian
‘Ezra’
the book snapshot prophet,
and Idaho radio poet
with Father Coughlin
the radio wandering priest
with Gerald L. K. Smith
railing against the people
“of the Book”
hiding their identities
for greater humanity, 1950
liking music
Plato and NATO
forgotten God
for bankrupt princes
false kings and pawns
Sadducees, all,
selling liberally
for popular culture
mass humanity sold
for scions of Rothschild gold
or Lenin Pavlovianism,
Einstein and Eisenstein red
and poor Louis Z.
the last poet
taught in a democratic world
to be caught alone
is a crime of cinema verité
like listening to contrapuntal Bach
when the earth is heavy
with mass executions
pronouncement, declarations,
orations, creations,
and in the genesis
was Logos
and on a double cross,
the Chicago
doubting St. Thomas scholars
armed with New Criticism,
jargon of double-mind
conversations of friends’ disciples,
overwhelmed with
the universe of knowldege,
sophistry and translation:
i.e. Poetry is for those
who cannot have roses
who rise
from beds of pleasure
and have known
the fair or brown-faced
types of the East Side:
London, the Bridge
has tumbled
Jerusalem, “It is
in the hands of infidels,”
heroes with Hear O Israel
on the Western Wall,
the painted decadents and descendants
of Rembrandts
so loved on Fifth Avenue
and New Rochelle
the ferris wheel of Kultur
masked in the unknown
kitsch of a kitchen sink
doll, rolling with laughter
broken in Berlin
transported to the East
sold in pawnbrokered
Manhattan
all awaiting the red dot
of the Valhalla’s beast,
walking blindfolded
in Homeric praise
with the girl flowers
and star boy asters
offered to Moloch’s days,
the Jew, always sadly suspicious
“Does he like me; Does he like me not”
the poet, somewhat delirious,
“Everything has been said,”
the velvet aesthete,
“No one can wash my feet,”
the avant garde
eating up Kierkegaard,
and that little one
saying in Solomon’s porch
“There is nothing new,
tourists may not leave
their shoes
outside the gates
of the Inferno,
this is where Herr and Frau
lived in luxury
and pleasure
as befits the master race,”
and the history of Adam
begat and began
and ended with
the master plan
for the face of lust
ended in a piece
of atomic dust
in twelve-toned hair
and mascara whore
without regret
in the scarlet piety
beyond the last door,
who will live
and who will be
put to sleep,
tonight
Die Welt
recording for the rewarding
of the strong and the weak,
a child in Bethlehem
awaiting his cradle cross
and all for thirty shekels
and dirty manger
and the dross
and ram
and the son of Abraham
put to the axed tree
awaiting each day
each night
is our ass-driven Calvary
and who may follow me,
make your flight
not in the winter
hold your Isaac
close to your breast
in a merciless hour
of man’s rib
announcing in headlines
of the Great Trib,
“of a barbarism
not yet known,”
turn from the fig leaf
mark my stone body
belief is confounded with arrows
of our didactic pride
you are yet living
have not yet died
the gates are wide open
for the King,
Hail the dialectic
I sing ars poetica.