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

When the President’s Poet came, we listened,
waiting silently in the dark--I and all the others
(the four or five hundred gathered there and
all the others beyond)--listened,
waiting, wanting--
how can I say this?--for grace? a witness? an
epiphany?--but he told only of connected lives,
of how, gazing out from his Manhattan skyline
composing this, his fingers touching the keys
touched mine, yours and mine, how we were all
bound together by the common strands of televisions,
internets, one voice conducting the other through
silicon, transistors, vacuum tubes, the copper veins
of commerce streaming thru all our hands….

and so my attention went from him to the man
breathing beside me, to the labored breathing of
his sleep, and when the reading ended and I was
pushed through the doors into the same blinding
Sunday, everyone rushing out to get saved or shop
or visit someone dying, when a jogger ran by with
a cell phone growing from his ear-- (his mind connected
to a voice in the cosmos while his body ran on without him)--
when, in the sky above, the vaporous white string
of a military jet unraveled the earth’s blue yarn,
and when, finally, a dog trotted past, stopping to sniff,
lift his leg, and water the rose bush outside the theater,
I knew I had to write my own way through the wanting--

mine and all the others breathing darkness from this light--
each voice held under my tongue as a pained confession--
each poem recited in silence, word by weathered word.