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Water can conform to its container, or it can gather in force as whelming as a wave. What will you choose?
Volume 03: Flourish / Collapse
A journey along the axis of abundance and absence, proliferation and putrescence, life and death
An exploration of geographic location and freedom of action and thought
This issue seeks to answer the question: What does “natural” mean now?
After being named poet laureate of the United Kingdom last year, Simon Armitage announced a new prize for poetry about the environment, citing the climate crisis as an inescapable presence in his life. Here, Armitage paints a portrait of collapse on a more intimate scale with an exclusive new poem for Atmos.
WORDS BY SIMON ARMITAGE
hooked up
to the morphine gun
all you did for a week
was breathe and sleep |
then the breathing stopped |
they reckon the angels demand their share
of the sherry butt, but
what do angels care
for see-through, watery
spiritless air? |
wouldn’t they sooner trawl or dowse
for the booze itself,
for soulful liquids cradled in oak and drowsing for years
under blankets of mould,
bloodgroups chalked on the barrel ends,
the transfusions at work? |
in the hushed bodega it’s never more
than a purple dusk;
on its ward-round
a dragonfly sips
from a weeping cask
This article appears in Volume 03: Flourish/Collapse of Atmos.
