like a line from a poem

Good to hear Simon Armitage on radio this morning; launching the Laurel Prize - there's more background to the story here ...

... reminded me that - to my shame! - the only Simon Armitage collection I own, is his first book of poems: Zoom! (1989, as pictured); now 30-years old :-)

But here's a more up-to-date Armitage poem, which he has released to mark the launch of the Laurel Prize:


leaving the world to the world

so the peloton passed
like a line from a poem
across the eye,

millipede legs
scuttling for Holme Moss |
we trod in its slipstream,

authorised trespass,
the main road
cordoned-off

to petrol and piston,
the tarmac kindly and warm
to our bare feet,

an asphalt fairway
vaulted by sycamore, rowan, beech,
woods to both sides

reinstated as woods |
when a thought approached
in the form of a child

tightrope-walking the white lines
between cats’ eyes | she said:
If I breathed the word

that disappeared all people
in the world,
leaving the world

to the world, would you
say it? Would you
sing it out loud?

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Simon Armitage (1963 - )

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