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

Mountains were travelling with us
Converging and falling away like swallows
A cloud caught the abrasion of the sun
Red-raw, fraying. The road steepened.
My hands are at the wheel, my left eye
In the inside mirror, widens.
Can it recognise itself this far?
So far, so wide, the moor will never close
There’ll be no city over its wild domes
Ahead the sky arranges its reception:
What multiple interweavings
In those streaks, stilled there:
Those you will meet, those you will become.
Shale-brown, lead-grey houses
Lit windows in August, floods in gutters
Mountains suspended North in threads of rain.
In front of them, spires. A cliff
Upended, and no way back through that
Stone curtain, that rock mask of thoughts.
Houses stare at each other
As if not in the same street
The air is clear and impenetrable as diamond.

Through falling leaves, across puddles
The wind is straining
To make a summer
Angular people
Wait for clenched
Walls to fold them in
And bring them home.
In a cafe, long
Negroid fingers start
Peeling an orange, dark
Talons of cloud
Tearing the sun
Then night drains
The dregs of brewery smells
From empty cambers
Open to the gleaming
Instruments of stars.

Wind, stone and sky
And no interception
But one evening at a friend’s
High window over squares
Each ore of separable shades
Had melted from the stones
Fused out by a full moon
That ravelled the broken sky,

And one afternoon in the warm
Crook of a sea-wall
A couple of girls and a man
Stood talking. In that flash
Of sun and a moment, nothing
Of their tragedy remained.

Weather and hills
Clash into peace.
The movement of the grass stems
That bend to all they touch
Absolvingly. The wind trembling
And over their heads
And under their roots
The intolerable thrust of stone
The loaded distance.