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

1.
Black and white ripples run up the hide
and veldt flies rise
as lions sniff the air.

Butterflies dance in the heat
far from the roses and the fierce girl
poised on some English lawn

While my sister sleeps
on a hot summer's night
and I watch the sullen Thames
slide out to sea.

2.
The fierce girl
denudes another stalk of thorns
grasps the stem
and stands the rose
in a brown jug.

She glances
at the soft clodhopperiness
of the close-up butterflies -
would like to stretch out a finger
to run it along their cigar bodies
and stroke their damascene dust

but the taut Victorian stockings
of zebra legs
draw her into themselves
and they pound the veldt with her.

Tomorrow
she will wear her orange slice dress
and suck those tiny tips of thorn
from her fingers once again.
 
3.
The sea shimmers beyond the Norfolk pines
in Oriental Bay. There are roses everywhere
and butterflies wafting on the Wellington wind.
I thought I saw her today

the fierce girl, on Lambton Quay
a lily protruding from her hair
and boots below a white net skirt,
but no desiccated oranges

tugging at the hem
in the gusts, the sudden gusts,
and no surreptitious sucking
of a wounded thumb.

I will find her yet.

4.
So she's over there, too?
the fierce girl? Perhaps she's just
disembarked; jumped ship
after working her passage to N.Z.
-a galley skivvy. Hair-stuck lily
her proof of landfall.

Her boots are made for walking,
her white net skirt a passport
to any wayout club
she may stumble upon
as she hitches north
to Cape Reinga.

I think, in an earlier life,
she hung around Crete
while Theseus performed aerobics
with the Minotaur - both revelling
 
in their naked strength, she
bored out of her mind
by their physical feats
and tired of being
merely a spear-carrier.