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

               He'd stumbled out into the garden that night
in a flood of tears as the room swarmed
               with birds, their metal-hard wings

beating at his face and hands
thump and flutter like angry blood
          pulsing in a vein

                                        and finally came to his senses if senses they be
                      a helicopter swooping low over
        searchlights rattling the grass

and gone. Dripping and shuddering
         his back bent hard as iron
         face nettle-red scalp raw

       he made for the forest. Dear God, how long has this been now?
                                               Light rain sifts
                                                                through the bare trees.

“...You'll be seven long years a bird in a bush
               seven long years a tongue in a bell
               seven long years a porter in hell..."

the star-wheel slowly turns
grinding his destiny
         on the rim of the known world

       its dust forms a pattern he cannot decipher
just shuffles through in the dark. And the years whip past
       like dead leaves scattering on a sudden breeze.

                                             A golden oriole
      is nailed to the Church door.
                                             Unpopular man

     at night his tears slit the sky's belly
              shivering in a ditch
                        a pillow of acanthus

                 outcast in his own land
          stealing bags of sugar from Red Cross parcels
to spike army petrol tanks

he stepped out of his old life
          like a sheared sheep
                             walks away from her wool

His conscious mind submerged in the personality
of a fox. If he finds a cup of milk or meal
on a doorstep in the night

he does not question that it has been placed there for him.
                             Still water & mirrors
                                      hold no attraction,

         afraid to own a body, own a soul,
and the villages seem to have slept a hundred years
       the roadsigns now in an unfamiliar language.

       Nose clipped against the stench
       he raises a midnight drainlid
       an alleyway deep in shadow

          and passing the town square
glances, once, aghast, at the bitter harvest
          hung in lines below the flag

To leave the town again tonight
           he must hide in a cartful of hay.
eleemosynary

                    among Illyrian rushes, a door has slammed on a past
          where he moved in glittering halls
among the firelight and the singing

now even the blackbirds' song seems harsh
        a door swinging in the wind
                       banging shut again and again

                       fire is a gift we all crave
                       music just a spell from which we must wake:
Awake . . . ah, now therein lies a thought

he cannot catch, wriggling out of sight
       behind that door that he cannot open
                       he feels like some kind of hostage...

       No, cold. Cold is all he feels. History is a plain
       and endless meadow, starred with the clean white bones
of all those who have stopped to think and feel.

Once Speed meant Distance and Time
                              but now that there is no Time, has Speed any meaning?
                                                                 Or Distance...?

Only hunger and pain and need
and an empty place, an imprint
of what may once have been another

        Identity. He knows that he is a broken lock
thrown aside when the key was found not to fit
        or to fit too well

         Solitude would only have a meaning
in the presence or memory of another. Infinite Sorrow.
         There is method in his madness.

The queen's body
         it is but little
                    as is the nightingale’s

but her mind
         is vast as the crystal spheres.
                    It is this soured land.

She has not forgotten him yet,
         and will not till there is nothing
                    of him left to remember...
                    he
                     breaks
                         in
                        waves
                        on
                     her
                 shore