São Jorge
I
'Avenida Antonio Serpa 13' it read on the map,
pointing, we asked the pissed-off bus driver –
he fingered out the window. I gave him 5 Euros.
10am. Campo Pequeno. Hotel Berna,
first floor, Room 121: we poured
onto the lime-shaded sheets sleeping ...
II
the flight had taken it out of us,
and the Portuguese sun reddened
our pallid skin, like the weathering
of pale inexpensive leather for sale at no price
at all, two red faces for the price of one,
going cheap on Romford's stalls.
III
at the banks of the Tagus is a city brimming
with moderns and seven hills, gutted swathes of fish
amassed for Portuguese pallets by evening.
Beneath the Castelo de São Jorge, the descendants
of this borderless patch, patter like drunk ants
by the billion into their midnight pousadas.
A fortress at Belém sits empty with history, water,
dust and indifferent gringos in Kodak moments,
looking for a slice of themselves in 1514.
The shrieking of fada in the eight o'clock
Avenida de Liberdade, grafted onto suppertime fish
and a mandarin sky, releases a smile that took forever.
Blenheim
… in the cotton-swathed
eight o’clock sky,
a stained tent
of whitish auburn
pelts to pace
over the evening –
like spoonfuls of tiramisu …
Without
The lilacs
mounted on the cheeks,
purple with endeavour,
drawn outward
from gloss scarlet lips
& pouting with dark wants
are colours lost
forever, moribund at the feet
of our first love
and from this distance,
with eyes paralysed, tears
gripped by ptosis
I despair.
Chernobyl by Mimesis: a response to Estill Pollock's translations of Lyubov Sirota's poetry, featured in Projected Letters
After 1986,
we heard of you.
Before that, nothing.
Pripyat was a speck
myopic on the linen
bed quilt of humanity,
then, a cause
for misery
over the unimaginable;
gamma-beta radiation
in the fatal pelt,
a jinx swam delving
head-first into the lungs
of Soviet and civilian.
The invisible shrapnel,
burning through
ontology and hides,
conquering the molecular
being
of twentieth century gods,
for a short time
was clearly visible:
we gazed towards you.
Returning, now,
to our twenty-first century
immortality,
the lateness of the season
that came upon you
in a sudden
perishes in a daze.
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