The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Sheila Black

BARCELONA

So many ways to be ruined.  In the stone squares around
the Placa, discarded needles, a spray of blood,
the words of the murdered poet.  Green like the wild
horses.  A girl eats bread absently, crumbs falling
from her long fingers.  A wounded pigeon hops on one
leg.  The stones themselves are pitted, scarred
here.  When the revolution ends, men hold stones
in their mouths to stop them from speaking.  Never
enough wine or bread no matter how often it
is multiplied.  In the church, the crooked child wishes
to be something else.  A length of smooth wood,
a stick that would help someone walk or beat
a man with a sound like wind.  Cruelty sprouts in
the slender weeds between the cobblestones.  Anything
better than to be always crushed this way.  We, too,
came here hungry.  Brandy and coffee in the cheap
cafes, so many cigarettes our throats ached in
the mornings.  What was dying between us briefly
lovely—a respite from our seasons of slow bickering.
In the cathedral, built like a child's dribbled sandcastle,
the slashes of light in the darkness, saying there would
be an after, saying we would get through this, and
the stairway with its warm smell of piss and sour wine,
where we climbed into the bleaching light, where we
understood what it would be to be forgotten.





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