Poetry Magazine

I came across this fantastic journal yesterday which according to their website is 'the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world'. Little wonder.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine

Inside this find were some absolute treasures, among them 'In The High Country' by  David St. John. There are too many wonderful and eminently thievable things in this poem, the kind of things that make you wish you had thought of them first. Sadly, I didnt, but the poem is consolation enough...

In The High Country

Some days I am happy to be no one

The shifting grasses

In the May winds are miraculous enough

As they ripple through the meadow of lupine

The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven

& do you see that boy with his arms raised

Like one of Raphael’s angels held within

This hush & this pause & the sky’s lapis expanse?

That boy is my son & I am his only father

Even when I am no one

Another of my own for good measure...

River Bed

If, at night, I should wade into a river,

it is not because I have followed the moon

and the reflections it tricks off the water like flotsam.

Say that I wade in a river at night

that the water might make a pearl of my insides,  

fathoms deep in the swim of the tide.

Say I have gone to the river tonight

to rest my head in the thick of the kelp,

to imagine myself in the melt of the waters,

And if, by day, I have not ferried back,

it is only because I am sunk in the loam

and the eddy’s closed over around me.

Then say I am lost and build me a cairn

out of coral, for this is the place where my body

will rest and the river will flow on above me.

Prayer - Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Oysters - Seamus Heaney

John Olsen - Study for soft-ground etching 'Seamus Heaney and oysters', 1994

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

The Mad Cow Talks Back - Jo Shapcott

  

I'm not mad. It just seems that way

because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I'm a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It's risky when
you're good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there's the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it's glorious
because it's always when you're travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain's like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.