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

1.   Along with your ashes, the barely 
      written ones, obliterating
      the ode, the incited roots, the alien
      eye--with imbecilic hands, they dragged you
      into the city, bound you in
      this knot of slang, and gave you
      nothing. Your ink has learned
      the violence of the wall. Banished
      by your brothers, you cant the stones
      of unseen earth, and smooth your place
      among the wolves. Each syllable
      is the work of sabotage.

2.   Flails, the whiteness, the flowers
      of the promised land: and all
      you hoard, crumbling at the brink
      of breath. For a single word
      in air we have not breathed, for one
      stone, splitting with the famine
      inside us--ire,
      out of bone's havoc, by which we kin
      the worm. The wall
      is your only witness. Barred
      from me, but squandering nothing,
      you sprawl over each unwritten page,
      as though your voice had crawled
      from you: and entered the whiteness
      of the wail.

3.   Scanned by no one
      but the loved, the margins
      rehearse your death, playing
      out the travesty
      of nakedness, and the hands
      of all the others
      who will see you, as if, one day
      you would sing to them, and in the longer
      silence of the anvil, name them
      as you would this sun: a stone,
      scourged by sky.

4.   Vatic lips, weaned
      of image. The mute one
      here, who waits, urn-wise,
      in wonder. Curse overbrims
      prediction: the glacial rose
      bequeaths its thorns to the breath
      that labors toward eye
      and oblivion.
      We have only to ready ourselves.
      From the first step, our voice
      is in league
      with the stones of the field.

5.   The blind way is etched
      in your palm: it leads to the voice
      you had bartered, and will bleed, once again
      on the prongs of this sleep-hewn
      braille. A breath
      scales the wick of my stammering,
      and lights the air that will never
      recant. Your body is your own
      measured burden. And walks with the weight
      of fire.

6.   Unquelled in the voiceless
      hull, where seed ends, and augurs
      nothing: you will plow
      the choral rant
      of deepnesses, and go the way
      that eyes go. There is no longer
      path for you: from the moment
      you slit your veins, roots will begin
      to recite the massacre
      of stones. You will dwell.
      You will raze
      your house here--you will forget
      your name. Earth
      is the only exile.

7.  The dead still die, and in them
      the living: all space,
      and the eyes, hunted
      by frail tools, confined
      to their habits.
      To breathe is to accept
      this lack of air, the only breath,
      sought in the fissures
      of memory, in the lapse that sunders
      this language of feuds, without which earth 
      would have granted a stronger omen
      to level the orchards
      of stone. Not even
      the silence pursues me.

8.   The left hand locks the door.
      The right hand pries a darkened stone
      from this pyramid of seeds,
      and all light
      grows without us. From one word
      to the next, the page is the heir
      of desert: its distance
      and obscenity, of which I am
      the scribe,--and the shadow, stumbling
      through this vast stone room,
      where the darkness cures me
      of my name.

9.   Rats wake in your sleep,
      and mime the progress
      of want. My voice turns back
      to the hunger it gives birth to,
      coupling with stones
      that jut from red walls: the heart
      gnaws, but cannot know
      its plunder; the flayed tongue
      rasps. We lie
      in earth's deepest marrow, and listen
      to the breath of angels.
      Our bones have been drained.
      Wherever night has spoken,
      unborn sons prowl the void
      between stars.