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

In the orchard rooms
globes are hanging
that the course of time will color
lamps that time will illumine
and whose light is smell

We breathe under each branch
the pungent whip of haste

*

They are pearls spread through grass
more pinkly lustrous
as fogs become less far

pendants more heavy
the less linen they adorn

*

How long they sleep
under a thousand green eyelids!

And how the heat

revived by haste
makes their eyes grow avid!

The gradual shadow of clouds
like an after-dinner sleep

Divinity of feathers
(simple image
or still bearing under wing
a true reflection)
swans or only clouds
it doesn’t matter

It was you who taught me
langorous birds
and now I watch it
under your wild plumage
amidst its linen and scale keys

*

August lightning

A mane shaken
sweeping powder from cheeks

so bold that even lace
weighs upon it

*

Fruits grown more blue with time
as though sleeping under a mask of dream
in the blazing straw
and dust of late summer

Shimmering night

A moment one would say
when the very source has caught fire

*

The care of the dove
is the day’s first step

breaking what the night binds

*

Leaves or sparks of the sea
or weather that shines and scatters

These waters, these fires joined in the glen
and the mountains suspended:
my heart suddenly fails me,
as if carried off too high

*

Where none can dwell or enter
is what I have run toward
the night come
like a thief

Then I look up the reed again that measures
the tool of the condemned

*

Images more fleeting
than the rush of wind
bubbles of Iris where I slept!

What closes and opens again
and rouses this uncertain breath
this noise of paper or of silk
and of waves of light wood?

This noise of tools so distant
that one hears it as a fan?

For a moment death seems vain
desire itself is forgotten
for what folds and unfolds
before the mouth of dawn