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

The star-system Cygnus X-1 contains, according to Stephen Hawking, a planet orbiting a black hole. ‘When the star has shrunk to a certain critical radius, the gravitational field at the surface becomes so strong that the light-cones are bent inward…light can no longer escape.’ A Brief History of Time, p.87.

1.

Only a little light escapes from us
Or just enough.

At the edge of a region where light turns
Round us to a horizon of no events

Here there are still sunflowers,
A world only just refusing to vanish

And trapped by force
We remember our future
Just as it happens now,
According to laws which if we
Believe them soon will be invisible,
Or visible if we do not.

And though the cave-drawings of deer
Have become Chartres
Not enough time before we and they
Are crushed into what was space.

Bowed time, out of the East window.
Moss floated in oil.
Only a little light or not enough.

2. Cougnac

Stunted oak, hazel, chestnut, beech,
A star on its forest shelf.

Hand-prints at a wall-face, half-alert,
Fumbling time’s earth.

I see us in a recent
Sequence winding among
Flower and stone-edged streets
Or feeding into streaks on a cave wall
The appetite of a glimpse:
Strobe-lit figures, intervals
Of dark, as though a blind;
With Routes Nationales, Autoroutes,
Hidden prohibited gates, sunlight
On the leather-skinned river,
Stalls tight-packed like seed
In the Twelfth Century.

Hands are retracing a slow extension of hands
Back to their half-seen, self-original place;
Throats and manes of bison
That shadow us with extinction;
Shoes lodged in the same unwashed mud
With colours in a market, smudges
As real; a complex arm scratching
Sound from time, until it ends
At its own finger-ends.

3. Jodrell Bank

Tilted against boredom of slate and cloud
Where the universe is background farmyard noise,
Face-forward, it offers itself to what lasts,
What bends, what hunger drives it, what will support
The weight of its curiosity, what tight-rope track
Crosses the abyss, what symmetry it can count on.
It won’t admit a snail might be as interesting
In the grass, turning round with softly baffled
Antenna.

4.

Anger, relief, numbness…
Voices of people nobody wants to believe,
Voices gently whispering in their beds.
Also voices that curve space round them,
Go nowhere, meet nothing at the edge, fail
To exchange, resist all other sound even
While they are dreaming, even while silent.

5.

Where we are
So is chalk, wheat,
Each other and the sun’s
Resilience, clouds,
Spaces between secrets
Between spaces.
A half-moon
Over the wilderness ridge
Of oak-leaf.
Submarine wind,
Squid and the White Sea.
So are photons and nuclei,
Facts and absence of facts,
Unmapped squares of sand.

As water trickling under the stare
Of a kitten
This is what it is
In all directions,
Yet how can we
Contribute
Seeing that the sun will put us out
As tyre-wheels
Over a green lizard,
Its own propped-open eye
Sucking in light.
Or just when it matters
To somebody’s one chance
The iron bar
Temporarily slips,
An oil drum
Falls from jib to wharf.

The terrorist
Is accident.
Everything at the whale’s mouth,
Plankton.
Through observatory-glass
Or baleen,
A trickle of water.
The sun, irresistible,
A few openings in stones
Whose memory
Tails off into space.
The globe,
The eye and its softness to damage.