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

The steady cedars levelling the shade
Bend in the water of each diamond pane.
Furred cusp and sill: other effacements made
Where the armorial glass in bronze and grain
     Stiffens a lily on the clouded sun.
     The lozenge hatchments of the porch floor run

Far out to grass. The grave Palladians
Have gone to seed, long genealogies
Dissolve beneath their wet and gentry stones;
The leaves lie shaken from the family trees.
     As kneeling putti, children from the Hall
     Are playing marbles on the mildewed wall.

The letters and the memoirs knew His will;
All Spring contracted to the one hushed room.
White swelling grew, he passed the cup, lay still;
To the bed’s foot she saw the dark spades come.
     They made such vanishings their deodands;
     The earth records what the earth understands.

Queen’s May beneath his firstborn’s coffin lid:
A lock of hair reserved, a brief prayer said.
‘Each lifeless hand extended by his side
Clasped thy fresh blossoms when his bloom was fled.’
     Pain wrote in copperplate one epigraph,
     Then sealed the album’s crimson cenotaph.

Behind locked doors, an audience of hymnals.
Tablet and effigy rehearse their lines
To cold light falling in a cold chancel.
Grammarians at their Roman slates decline
     Each proper noun. Bells close on a plain song.
     All speak here with an adult, eheu tongue.

But those frail mounds, brushed low by ancient rain,
Their markers undiscerned in the half-light . . . ?
The last of day ghosts out a window; stains
The scarred porch wall, whose rough and honeyed weight
     Glows from the shade: stone so intangible
     A child might slip between it, bones and all.