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

Angels, annunciations and evangelists pour down
around us in profusion. Their very number begins
to convince: the door swings to behind us and
we flinch, half-persuaded some baroque figure
poised for victory has flitted to a new position,
better-placed to harangue us on the glories of salvation.
Paintings and sculptures, in this church
they wring their hands and gesture to us in all the tones
of rhetoric like some very early tv talk show.
We cut swiftly from the altar to the decorated pulpit,
to the paintings by the door, to the ceiling
where a host awaits us. Those who set this up
believed in this display, saw these figures as no less
real than the workings of arithmetic or geometry,
markings that sketched out truths that existed independent
of our ability to think them up or put down
rough calculations of a world whose numbers reflected
divine multiplication. The accords of music
were no coincidence for them, and every hymn
produced harmonies that in themselves confirmed
the propositions that were sung. We who believe
in the hard realities of statistics and quantum experience,
should we not find this number sequence to our liking too,
and gaze in rapture at these figures no more unlikely than
the sphere and rod constructions of classroom molecules
we confirm so solemnly to doubting pupils? Could this be true?
No, I mutter firmly as we head for light again, but believe
as little in my own accustomed explanations. “What does it all
add up to?” you say with unexpected pertinence, and we argue
at least for long enough to feel humble, and ready for revelation.