The window of the latest hotel room doesn’t offer much of a view. But I’ve always like red brick and it would be a lot more depressing if there weren’t that glorious unbroken blue sky.
Continue reading “room with a view”
Category: spain
windfarm
En un lugar de La Mancha, driving
along an empty motorway, we see
giants on the horizon. Full tilt
we race towards them.
Long arms whirl and sharp blades
slice the air. We hear aeolian music
serenading Dulcinea.
sea sounds
While I was in the south, I managed to get an hour or so to walk along the marine parade at Alicante, which is as good an excuse as any to post this old piece, written in response to a challenge to write a favourite joke as a poem:
Continue reading “sea sounds”
progress
Hemmed in by mountains,
they built church spires –
antennas to speak to God. Now,
high-rise office blocks and flats
impede the signal.
(The village in the photo has grown enormously since I first visited seven or eight years ago. The pine on the left of the picture kindly obscures the crane perched up on the heights in the north, while the one on the right obscures the modern apartment blocks that remain unfinished to the south east, victims, apparently, of the crisis in the Spanish construction industry.)
more home thoughts
The topics of home and place cropped up several times during my brief trip south.
As I said yesterday, for me – and for several other writers there – “Where is home?” isn’t an easy question to answer.
In the discussion, someone rephrased it as, “Where would you want to be when you die?”. But, apart from the obvious suggestion of “somewhere else”, I can’t really see that it matters.
This is not meant to be a blog about me, so it seems slightly strange to be talking about personal information; I’m including it, though, because ‘place’ is very important to a lot of my writing, and the phrase poetry of place is one that crops up a lot on writing workshop and course listings.
Continue reading “more home thoughts”
don't confuse the narrator 