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

1.
Sometimes you see clouds drifting past the city,
inventions of the sky,
within which images appear then petrify
and remain there in perpetuity.

Otherwise things shift with a certain insouciance
but keep moving. Meaning vanishes
into night, into the vacant parishes
of the imagination, into a non-presence

that is positively terrifying. But there,
the clouds still loom like statues
with faces, as if one could choose
to see them suspended in imagined air.


2.
I have jumped to conclusions in my time.
What else would you jump to otherwise?
Look hard into the eyes
of language and you see nothing. Only rhyme

and punctuation. I have talked to ghosts
in ghost language, the solemn dead
at their jabber, hearing the implied instead,
the sigh of the wind at its last post.

I once had a mother who used at times to speak
but now I only conjure her. We carve
images into clouds so we should not starve
for lack of company. We break

the silence into pieces, syllables of space.
We are translated into ourselves. The sky
rushes at us. We observe it insouciantly,
watching clouds move, looking for a face.


3.
We have seen mirrors in darkened rooms
hunger for us. We have seen the dead
in our streets. We have felt the dread
of our faces and the shapes a face assumes

in its own mirror. We owe them a shape,
all those faceless ones, you and I.
We should feed them before they petrify,
before their clouds pack up or else escape.


4.
How do I know myself before I have created
my simulacrum? How are the hungry
to be fed? Listen, the sky is angry.
The gods are demanding to be translated.