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

I. SPRINGTIME

The Canadian spring has a power and a vigour found in no other
          country
From under a billion tons of snow and ice
Suddenly
Bounteous nature
Clumps of violet white blue pink
Orchids tiger-lilies heliotropes
Along venerable avenues of maples birchtrees and black oaks
Birds flutter and sing
Inside copses renovated with fresh buds and shoots
The sun’s the colour of liquorice

By the roadside woods and plots of one of Winnipeg’s grandest
        estates
Five miles later, at its centre, a gentrified farmhouse built
        from slate
Here lives my good friend Coulon
Risen before daybreak he rides from farm to farm on a big bay
        mare
The paws of his hareskin bonnet flap about his shoulders
Dark gaze Bushy eyebrows
Pipe to chin
The night is misty and cold
A furious western wind ruffles supple pines and larches
A glimmer that is starting to spread
Crackling as from a brazier
The fire, taking hold, devours undergrowth and twigs
The stormwind distributes resinous bouquets
Immense torches flare up at random
The fire takes up more and more of the horizon
White trunks black trunks turning red as blood
Dome of chocolate smoke where a million sparks form a flashing
        gyre now high now low
Behind this curtain of flame one glimpses shadows twisting like
        Kung-fu fighters in silhouette
Echo of axe-blows
A bitter song stretches over the blazing forest which a team of
        lumberjacks with aching arms now struggles to contain

II. CAMPAGNE

Guide-book or no, the landscape’s magnificent
Verdant forests of pine and beech and chestnut cut down here and
        there for fields brimming with wheat or hemp or oats
Everything breathes abundance
Once and hour or so one meets a farmhand with a hay-cart
In the distance birchtrees glimmer like silver columns

III. HUNTING AND FISHING

Wild duck   geese   peewits   bustards   teals
Grouse   thrushes
Arctic hares   snow partridges   ptarmigans
Salmon   rainbow trout   eels
Giant pike and crayfish with a peculiarly exquisite taste

Carbine over the shoulder
Bowie-knife in the belt
Both trapper and red-skin bend under the weight of their catch
Ring-doves and red partridges all in a row
Wild peacocks
Turkeys of the prairie
And even a great white and red eagle swooping down from the
        clouds

IV. HARVEST

Out in the fields two Fords and a flat-six
On all sides and as far as the skyline sheaves propped lightly
        one against the other turn the landscape, lozenge by
        hesitant lozenge, into a vast checker-board
Not a tree in sight
Down from the north drifts the din of threshing-machine and
        feed-truck
As up from the south rumble a dozen empty trains to carry off
        the wheat