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

Carefully, prise off the Arctic cap, set it to one side,
mind it doesn’t slide away. Find chisels, a shark-head hammer
and starting from the centre, walk round, chipping at the plateau ice
until you’ve hollowed out a bowl big enough to hold the moon.
Mind your eyes - ice-chits of aquamarine, turquoise, cerulean blue
will fly up then tinkle down in rhomboids, parallelograms,
diamonds. There’s bound to be a walrus tusk, whalebones
or maybe some corrugated tin the last lot left.
Use these to tidy up. Or cod-head scoops.

Stars begin to pinball,
dance their constellations high above the ice.
They peer down into the cavern of a proffered bowl.

The moon floats up
opening its fullness like a flower.

It sees the cap has shifted.
It sees the crater in the ice.
It sees a man.

His thoughts of thermo-gloves, rhomboids, hollowing out a bowl
trawl through space with Mozart, Desert Island Discs,
spent canisters, text messages, a dead monkey.

The man is holding a long-handled rake.
He reaches up into the night until his rake-head is lodged
behind the moon’s circumference.
He draws it down into the hole like winding in a silver kite.

A perfect fit,
an eye’s orb in its socket, a mouseball in a laptop.
Now a pale moonface, framed in ice stares out at stars,
its open mouth amazed at parallax, perspective,
how familiar points have vanished. Drag the ice-cap over.
Moonlid.

What happens next is faster than a blink.
Cod-boats can’t plot a course, are slipping back.
Gulls fall silent, wheel out in one thick airborne raft
towards a curvature they’ll never reach.
Down below in Spitzbergen and Storgenfjord
the automatic genny lights are flashing on.
Midnight. The Arctic Circle is a blaze of electricity
and all the spaceships out there are informed we have a problem.
In the non-light of night to consider the options carefully. Fast.