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

I saw you again, yesterday, fleetingly, from the train,
as I watched the land closing into shadow.
After this slow winter season of rain
the whole water-table has risen, so the evening,
opening a little, let sudden light race like mercury
into unexpected shallows washing the seeded barley.
Waist-deep in new lagoons willows etched black lace
of root and branch on the sky’s liquid glassy mirror,
while the brimming river in its swollen loop
drew a freight of dusky clouds across the fields.

Water spilling a wild brief glitter everywhere,
even at the edge of night.  Though much has changed
I recognised you by the leap I felt.  The same
as when I saw the flood below the house, at Walford.
Never again will we see the like in our time,
our neighbour told us, shaking her head at the marvel
even though we’d seen it almost every spring.
After storm, in a morning of delicate sun we’d wake
to find streams, brooks, rivulets, run-off gullies,
had all poured in a bright flood across the lane,
rushed through the bare quickthorn hedge
(panicking the sheep to higher ground)
to circle the burial mound, creating an island,
a quietness of lapping silver light
stealing the landscape from the kestrel and the lamb.
For miles the roads drowned shiningly.
We took the long way round, up the hill by Rose Cottage
and past the spangled peacocks at Candlemas, to school.
The water made us all buoyant with its extravagance;
now you are more finely drawn.

I miss you.  This spring I have travelled up and down
the country, restless as a hunting fox, hungry
with an absence difficult to name, or own, something more
than a sense of home slid in between blurred images
of a low stone house, a curved road beyond the rainfall
on the darkening glass:  reflections,
in a flash of water slipped from its leash to run
for a while in brilliance beneath the willow trees.