Free
Verse
A Village
in Iberia
When I first came here
there were many empty villages;
they are now slowly being repopulated, mostly by
foreigners.
I drove to the village
where I was born;
hadn’t been there for forty years.
The lane was muddy and the houses deserted;
this village had been abandoned a long time ago;
what was I thinking of coming here?
A tree had grown right through our cottage—
the roof was smashed and the walls were tumbling
down.
Puny human dwellings—the
tree seemed to say,
here today and gone in less than Ten decades.
What a nostalgic fool I am—this
idea of returning,
rebuilding the old house and living here in happy
retirement.
This was no longer a village but a graveyard—
houses were tombstones of a past
that had nothing to offer but poverty;
glassless window resembled crosses of a defunct faith.
I sat on a stone smoking a cigarette—
the aroma wafted through the drab silence.
From behind a broken wall a dog came.
It was young and looked eerily like Stella,
the dog I loved all those years ago...
Don’t tell me she has waited for five dog generations,
to return from the wasteland of eternity just for me?
“I’ll call you Stella”, I said, and stroked the dog’s
head.
She knitted her brows together as if to say, “What else?”
I opened the right hand car door; Stella jumped in
like she had done this a thousand time before.
I drove off and didn’t look back once—
the only memory I needed of my childhood,
was alive and snoozing in the seat beside me.
Vacation
Time
In a field alone a carob
tree has grown wide and tall;
it preens a bit, but I sense its loneliness.
In the next field trees jostle for space,
roots entwined—happy
poverty?
Yet In the noon heat it’s under the big tree
sheep come to seek shade. I joined them—
sat on a stone—smoked
a cigarette.
A ewe sneezed and pointed to a sign on the tree:
“No smoking, bad for the wool.”
I spat on my cigarette—
can’t risk a bushfire,
opened my lunch box, gave an apple to the ewe,
and since my coffee was black, I milked it.
I told my flock that the sheep in Honduras,
which give the whitest wool,
have taken the best grazing land,
and no one seems to care.
They chewed and chewed, some even burped,
but no one made a comment.
Harvey’s
Brother
I paused in,
the shade of a carob oak, to smoke a cigarette,
when a rabbit crossed the track, stopped, sat on its
haunches
and sniffed the air. Do not come nearer, my furry friend
the temptation will be too great and I’ll shoot you. It
didn’t,
but I shot it any way, gutted and skinned it on the spot,
hoped no one heard the bang—the
hunting season had yet to start.
At home I cut it into nice pieces; added, onion, garlic,
parsley
and with butter gently fried it in an iron pan,
then I let it simmer with red wine for some time.
I went into my study to read the papers;
the rabbit sat on top of my desk eating yesterday’s poetry—
a nice animal, grey and blue, with silky fur,
and I thought of a movie called “Harvey.”
Back in the kitchen I put the stew in a dish
and gave it to the neighbour’s dog.
Harvey has gone now he doesn’t even appear in my dreams.
On A day
Like This
The track I
followed this morning
once was an Eden landscape,
but, since the gardeners were fired,
it had gone to seed—it
was dry,
and exuded unrelieved ire.
The leaves on bushes were rusty shaving blades;
they tried to cut me up and drink my blood.
Neglected olive trees tried to trip me up
with sudden exposed roots wanting to absorb my body,
so they, full of revulsion, could live for a hundred more
years.
Dead rabbits in the glade had been stabbed
by blades of grass sharp as a mafia assassin’s stiletto;
furred creatures shivered in their burrows.
Hurt, I made it to the main road where a nurse waited—
with sticking plaster, a soft bosom
and the aroma of motherhood, she was my friend and lover,
but, alas, only as virtual as friends in facebook.
Mr. Nice
Guy
Saw her
stacking shelves at the supermarket—
my instinct was to take her in my arms,
away from all this, and ask her marry me.
But I remembered we had been married before—
how she had wanted a divorce because I had no ambition, a
mere short order cook, and how the court
secretly had sided with her, and treated me with dislike,
and yes, I had to leave our flat.
Later she married a man who sold Mercedes cars.
He wore a suit to work and had shiny fingernails,
but he used too much au de cologne—
the type who doesn’t bath often
and rarely changes his underwear.
He stole money from the till and ended up in prison...
and me? I’m a manager now of a burger bar,
perhaps I should offer her a job for old times sake?
No, that would be rubbing it in, so let her stack shelves.
The
Amazement
The track I
walked, in the thorny landscape, was full of loose
stones that kept coming up from the ground trying to trip
me up,
where the track narrowed amongst unkempt trees, boughs
tried to push me over, and in the undergrowth I heard
snarls
of animals too vicious and hideous too appear in the
flesh.
Overcast day and the wind that blew had ice on its
breaths,
I shivered alone in the enmity of a landscape gone feral.
But I staggered on unwilling to give into phobias and
fear,
suddenly stones went subversive and the path was soft as
a carpet, unseen animals disappeared and trees welcomed
me with fluttering leaves; even a love hungry zephyr
whispered sweet words. In a shimmering glade—smooth
as
a rich man’s lawn—a
plum tree, full of juicy fruit, I picked and
ate some; they tasted of magic and sweet marvel.
Dizzy with pleasure I sat on a stone, formed by ten
million
years of rain, like a throne—saw
sirens dance to Pan’s flute and
swim with sunrays and moon waves that hadn't made it home
and had to wait for night, and mother moon to come pick
them
up. Fell asleep when I woke up a boar, with her seven
piglets,
drank water by the lake’s far shore. White clouds on blue,
time
to go home and remember not to speak of this to anyone.
The Death
of Peter Pan
Peter Pan used
to be black, he could sing and dance
and make jazz hands. He was so good that it made
sense to make him white, the world embraced him.
Everyone had a stake in him as he was transformed
into a pale ghost with a plastic nose, no one laughed
too much money at stake. Peter Pan liked children
too much for normal society to tolerate, but money
smoothed the way, but do not do it again.
Peter Pan was fragile, doctors were always at hand to
give him injections that lifted his spirit and made him
feel good, and he needed more of it now that he was
middle aged, yet trying to look fourteen. His handlers
thought there was more money to wring out of his
tortured body. One, two, three, Peter couldn’t breath
collapsed in heap, and that’s a pity now that USA has
a black President and he could just be himself again.
Senryu
an Agnostic’s
nightmare—
waking up every night,
he dreams God exists
