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

   The singing of the skylarks on the summit of the Lance, at the end of the night of the summer solstice: that inebriation in the icy cold, those creatures rocketing up as if to call down the daylight that was visible to me only as its pallid reflection very gradually, indistinctly, coloured the rocks.

   I could not see them, though they had sprung up from the grass
nearby, I could only hear them as they rose, higher and higher, as if they were ascending through the black degrees of night. Magnificat anima mea . . .

   Almost as one, in an entirely invisible mass, they had burst forth like loud rockets from the high grass tossed by the wind, beneath the glacial whip of the wind; or rather, as I listened, scarcely able to stand upright in the wind, it seemed as if they were busy raising ever higher, with cries of joy (or rage), a sort of canopy, a dais as invisible as themselves, for it was black night still; or as if they were holding up a great bubbling chalice as an offering to the black sky. (So might a walker who has lost his way happen upon some savage and incomprehensible ritual.)
   But there was no dais, nor chalice, nor were there any sacred songs.
  
   Buffon has written, about the skylark: ‘It belongs to that small number of birds which sing as they fly; the higher it rises, the louder its voice.’
   And again: ‘It has been said that these birds have an antipathy to certain constellations, for example Arcturus, and that they fall silent when this star begins to rise at the same time as the sun, apparently it is at this time they start to moult, and no doubt they would start to moult even if Arcturus did not rise.’
  
   It was a frenetic singing, you might have said it was sung to summon up the daylight, which was taking such a long time to colour the pale rocks.

   You might have imagined they were a cohort of angels attempting to raise the huge lid of night, there above the high grass whipped, lashed by the icy wind.

   Would the door ever open? It would not be for lack of their crying a summons to the day.

   In the ascent and the singing of these small creatures there was a
violence which even now fills me with amazement. By no means were these little arias such as might delight the salons, nor were they elegies. They pierced your ears and the sky itself, in the almost total darkness and the fusillade of cold. You would indeed have thought, however absurd it seems, that there was a connection between these cries and the stars, still far from vanishing.

   Lazarus still lies in his trough of stone.
   But they are tireless over the pale rock,
   invisible, obstinate, frantic.

   Who has ever cried out like that to force the day?

   More strident than the stars, where, so it seems, they will go and lose themselves.

   The most striking thing about all this: the pallid rocks, the lashing
cold and the almost frantic challenge, as if to force the sky finally to
become light, to force it into resurrection, to haul Lazarus out of his tomb of stone; to lift the enormous weight of the stone slab of night.

   All the strings taut ready to snap.

   Like the mountain in that moment of darkness and intense cold, I was waiting to be filled with light, to stand up from the sarcophagus of rock like Lazarus, while the wind around me harrowed the grass.
   I was dead lke him and nothing was happening but my tonguelashing by the wind, my horsewhipping by the cold,
   and then, suddenly, that flock of birds absolutely invisible, reduced to nothing but their soaring, indefatigable cry;
   and as they rose higher and higher through the black degrees, you
would have thought they were busy raising the black lid of the tomb
   or that they were knocking at a door, all together
   like small frantic angels, furious little workers, with no tool other
than their shrill voices (jubilant or despairing, which was it?)
   to raise the black tombstone,
   to knock at that door which seemed it might never swing on its stone hinges.

   Whoever knocked like that with such insistence and rage
   in the mountains
   might they not also cause the day to break?

   Mountains against the light on a summer morning: water, quite simply, water.

   That poetry might bend, might soften for a moment, the iron of fate. Leave the rest to the talkative.

   Hornets and fire. To write ‘the hornets of fire’ would be a very facile poetry, but there is a connection between the two, as when sparks fly up into your face.

   For a whole night and around the whole circle of the horizon, a great rarity, the thunder rolls: the long and stubborn percussion of a Far Eastern orchestra.
   Or like a din of bones being shaken.

   *

   The thin crescent of the moon at evening seen in the garden, the sickle that is pure illusion, which is a sharp thing but also sweetly luminous, the ‘sickle of milk’, which will quickly lose its shape, which is inscribed for a moment on the sunset sky and is always a surprise and accompanies you faithfully, distant but
present. Naturally, the image of the sickle connects with the image of the hand that should be holding it, the hand of the reaper, the girl in a procession in honour of Ceres – as if nothing were visible of a festival except its emblem above the
crowd who are hidden by night; a thing naively felt to be good and friendly, because it attenuates, in this reflection, the other light that we can’t look in the face. And you say to yourself: She is still there, again, given to me without noise, without fuss, and not just to me, still there, as it was in the beginning of the world, to which, by her light, she seems to connect me. It is a sickle and it is a connection, faithfully going its way. Enough to incline you to believe that there is indeed, over there, a watchman doing his rounds, to protect us from the night.

   And I remember also the processions of children carrying lanterns, in the old days. And here just one child, left behind, untroubled, obstinate. To remind us that there is such a thing as childhood, a joyousness that is shy, naïve, almost blind; a song.

   In the figtree just now beginning to lighten and to show its leaves, the bird only bodied forth more visibly the wind.

   Burning brambles at the close of day, I suddenly saw the fog approaching, silence become visible, a cold wet smoke risen from water rather than from a fire, an exhalation of the soaked earth, a breath all at once as cold as steel, a threat perhaps, but one I loved because it was real, because it was alive, because it was ‘true’; as if anything were better than thoughts and death.
   Beasts in a herd that had come quite soundlessly to lick my hand with their cold tongues. Whilst night too was approaching.