don't confuse the narrator

shooting stars II

Yesterday‘s narrator had all she wished for, which might be why the poem was so short. Today’s narrator doesn’t, though she seems to have realised that wishing on a star won’t help:

Perseids

The night I met you fire flared in the skies
and seams of gold were visible across
the coalmine dark. Nature had purged the dross
of normal life, it seemed. We raised our eyes
to watch with joy as stars fell round about:
each one a dream of summer love, a wish,
each an unspoken promise, each a kiss
that fanned desire and silenced truth and doubt.
And so we boldly told each other lies,
pretending to believe they could come true;
we watched those stars like lovers, though we knew
that we could not escape existing ties.
At heart, we knew the stars are fixed, not free,
set in their courses, much like you and me.

star’ku

Watching shooting stars,
your arm around my shoulders

No need for wishes

For those who are looking for more perseids, I posted a few other pieces on the subject of shooting stars this time last year.

newsworthy

clarin-headline — clarin.com headline: Es noticia: ¡hay alguien que vive de la poesía!

I’ve often wondered whether there are places more or less conducive to life as a poet.

In the film El lado oscuro del corazón, the poet Oliveiro sells his poems on the street corners of Buenos Aires, and he does so with a lot more panache than the ragged beggars who hand out photocopied scraps of hand-written verse in the Madrid metro and from bar to bar around the Spanish capital.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find that it’s possible to make a living from poetry in la ciudad porteña, although, even there, it seems that doing so is sufficiently surprising that it rates a headline.
Continue reading “newsworthy”

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)