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

Look: still and hard,
Willing a sky
And the burnt August grasses

Sightless extremities.

The sea is ultramarine

Art being all
A matter of digestion -
The watcher, come to the hill is saying
Leave me to my appetites!

The journey, it was
As if we didn’t know
It had an ending

And I had schooled myself
To an absence of expectations,

But pre-Cambrian salute, the world
Entire, it is all
Familiar with itself
And the strangeness brought here
Is entirely us.

I being at miles with the stone
Am walking around a lake of silence.

The bird out here on the hill
Who watched me, from his scoop of water -
Snake-necked he dived and I was
Left with a blank page of water,
Grey, ruffled sheet of silence.

He had a moth-eaten look,
Being of a grey-brown colour.

. . .

You have to go a long way
To find you are already there,
It is schooling the breath
And time is the faint dragon
We saw almost gone on the stone,

We who will be replaced with
Something so much quieter than us.
It will be finally
Too much to hold -

There are munching armies
Out on the breath-filled
Silence of the hill.

Eye crawls to a surface
Where jellyfish is a splash
Of translucent pale purple,
Odd diagram of life
Being stretched on the rock of afternoon.

. . .

Walking on islands
Blue day and in it
Up to the hilt
The faint shore’s almost
Everywhere you look -

Path up the long shallow slope
That lets you into the field of sky,
Its compilations of clouds.

So where is there room for all the bones?
Here on the quiet islands
My feet clatter, incoming
Tide’s just a shimmer among the boulders.

The birds fly off with their names.

An evening wastes its calm.

. . .

We two held one hunger

Approaching the village
     There on the shore -
In blew the name of sand.

How can the day be here again
     After six thousand years?
The same sky drawn back like a hood.

Noon-sprawl the moment
     At ease with the dead -
A cliff topped with flowers

And all that sun-dark rock below.
     There is so much driftwood
Come to the shore -

A piece used in your studio
     Where it frames a window
Is lifting an eye to the sun.

Abrupt as flight
     A gull invades
Your driftwood pieces

Something work makes plain,
     It is a particular silence,
Your wooden tower

And at the point of rot
     Takes flight into
The plainness of the air -

This is how endings are made,
     The point of rot being where you work
Clearing that out, to make small rooms of air.

. . .

A stone rallies distance
     And the way this lintel
Sits here like a pillow

After five thousand years -
     It has a certain
Time-cancelling quality

Impacted, the
     Stone pages
Their runnels of erosion

Being lifted each
     Up against sky to
Make sun-linkage

Just next to the waves
     As when the first bird
Swam into stone, it

Seems like yesterday
     And weighed in the hand
Is the peace of an axe,

Hinged evasiveness
     Of the pronoun.
Sea eagles, brought into the cave

We’re in: days
     Of being where
Distance is impacted

Now coming in
     Hard to the house
From that sightless shore