Best Andalusia Poems
I lounge lazily on my deck chair
Up high in the spacious loggia
Loafing the time away, patient, waiting.....
The ocean ebbs into the small bay
As the sun sets far away over the horizon.
From below electric lights flash on
One by one and guitars are strummed.
The enticing aroma of paella wafts up
But I sit on, unmoved, immobile, waiting.
In the summer heat, I wait,
For the night to bring her near,
With a dance so sweet, she'll appear,
The summer heat is scarcely relieved
By the faint ocean breeze
The murmur of people reaches me.
She has arrived and the guitars sing.
So does my heart as I behold my wife.
Slowly she pirouettes on her dainty toes,
Her skirt resembling a veronica,
Like a cape that baits the bull
In a Spanish bloody arena.
But I sit on, unmoved, immobile, waiting.
I cannot see her red, red lips
That taste like lavender in height of summer,
I can just barely make out her silhouette,
Her sexual curves, her lithe footing,
Her inviting mien, her head held high,
a proud senora dancing just for love.
In the summer heat, I wait,
For the night to bring her near,
With a dance so sweet, she'll appear,
Soon the dance will end and I...
Why I just wait till she'll come to me,
In the dark cover of the night.
With a tequila and a night of love.
Flowered patios,
admired for their charm,
Andalusian patios lovingly cared for.
As new-born babies
that Andalusian women take care of
with gentleness, dedicating
their time with the same devotion
to as a baby who needs attention.
Beauty with big eyes
that shines in a blind world
to old emotions.
Patios of my Andalusia,
you sow joy in front of
the ones who feel love
for those old ladies,
whose lives flow among your cares.
I wish you would always live
Andalusian ladies!,
so that our eyes
could delight those magical patios,
full of colors and dedication.
Every flower has your name
written on it, every new wrinkle
on your face is the effort
of your everyday's passion.
Wait if red is color
Of noon
In Andalusia
I wear in rose
If hugs mingle
With kisses of rose
In night
I melt in rose of youth
In Andalusia
Form:
Un día voy a ir a ti, Córdoba
pasearé por las antiguas calles empedradas
y escucharé los ecos de hace muchos siglos,
de cuando los musulmanes gobernaron Andalusia
Veré las coloridas túnicas que fluyen
blancas contrastando con el sol deslumbrante,
infinitos jardines de simetría, flores exóticas, fuentes, cascadas.
Córdoba, entras en mi alma,
el aroma a especias y perfumes dulces saldrá de tus bazares
junto a los científicos, médicos y poetas.
Te vivo con el pensamiento,
zumbando estás entre ideas, vibrante,
una nueva forma de vida tolerante
en una increíble amalgama de personas, religiones, lenguas;
Así es como trabajamos mejor
vivimos entonces nuestro mejor momento,
¡Ah, cómo te anhelo mi Córdoba!
I lounge lazily on my deck chair
up high in the spacious loggia
loafing the time away, patient, waiting.....
The ocean ebbs into the small bay
as the sun sets far away over the horizon.
From below electric lights flash on
one by one and guitars are strummed.
The smell of paella wafts up
towards my rumbling stomach,
but I sit on, unmoved, immobile, waiting.
The summer heat is scarcely relieved
by the faint ocean breeze. Salty sweat
runs down my unshaven face,
a welcome taste as my tongue licks
the sides of my parched lips.
The murmur of people reaches me.
She has arrived and the guitars sing.
So does my heart as I behold my wife.
Slowly she pirouettes on her dainty toes,
her skirt resembling a veronica,
like a cape that baits the bull
in a Spanish bloody arena.
I cannot see her red, red lips
that taste like lavender in height of summer,
I can just barely make out her silhouette,
her sexual curves, her lithe footing,
her inviting mien, her head held high,
a proud senora dancing just for love.
Soon the dance will end and I...
why I just wait till she'll come to me,
in the dark cover of the night.
with a tequila and a night of love.
Aye, what a revolution in red and orange against the
venom of society and culture
With the flowers of right palm though a gesture of dance
in fact covers her tears
A story of blue tension and deep emotion in red flamenco
so flamboyantly executes the dancer
The crimson movement of the lyrical arms and torso
in sync with the guitar is awesome
Unique euphoria of exuberance in the swirl of a female figure
so provocative
What a dancing dream doing up the drawings of
the body on the fly
What a message of moons in mounds you convey
through the crafty curves
And each passing passion pulsates from prose to
poetry of muscles and bones
Eros encouraging us to transcend ourselves through
the journey of desire like a fountain
From brownish black towards the orange flames
on the comely conical mountains
And the warmly amber valley as it mingles with the
flames from the dancing spark
Blackens darkens and then harkens at joyous response
of mesmerized connoisseurs
Deepens the dense dance still further by generating
romantic proposition in her gestures
Unstoppable time hypnotized to stop for a moment to
stand and see how infinity can dance
Time itself in much ado on the long neck of
reddening movement
Aye, you dancing fire spreading your oranges everywhere
from Andalusia to Madrid
And then all over the globe amazing you me and all
in modern style of elegant gestures
Sliding the shoulder blades down the back and thus
the chest held proudly
Inviting inquisitive attention to read the poems
up to the chin and down the tall back
Closing the eye for a few seconds we see in awe our fertile
dear earth in a dance of rebellion
The earthy and raw in a fascinating gesture of life
we do need to feel so much
That while in the midst of viewing what you interpret
we too get merged in the dancing colour
Aha! What a phenomenon
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September 23, 2017
For the contest:Poems that paint a picture 3
Hosted by: Silent One
Rolling down the contours of Iberian Peninsula
the picturesque highlands of lofty Andalusia
fringe the landscape of the great plain of Spain,
cradling the ancient cities of Madrid and Segovia.
In the frenzy arena horny bull charges as if tipsy,
gyrating matador’s muleta whipping it doesn’t see,
for his agile feet move in rhythm of baile flamenco
like the flurry of the trotting steps of the gypsy.
Travel from one city to the other by train,
you need not visit Pygmalion once again,
you’ll make out the aim of mnemonic device…
“rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain”.
July 18, 2019
THE AL-ANDALUS QUARTET: PART FOUR
ALMERÍA / UMM AL-MARIYA 2007 AD / 1427 AH
The traveler who journeys to the City of Almería
arrives at a port where the routes of the ferries,
the whitecaps and waves, the salt-leaden gusts in
the searing white heat, the sculptures of dolphins
manifested at play on the boulevard perpendicular
to the sterns of great ships, reveal windows and
mirrors in which every reflection is a perplexing
distortion, generating questions impossible to
answer with the images at hand
Ciudad Almería is Umm Al-Mariya,
A city with barrios named Al-Musalá, Al-Medina,
Al-Haud, where visionary souls at the College of
Architects draw invisible lines from the markets of Fez
the minarets of Essaouira to the courtyards and gardens
of an Andalusia making paradise landscapes of red tiles
and roses, wrought-iron and jasmine, and burbling
fountains as seductive as the curvature of Arabic script;
where every dark eye under every headscarf, under
every skull cap, beneath flat-brimmed sombreros and
every dark curl blowing free in the breezes between
mountains and sea, sees only itself colored café con
leche, burned walnut by sunlight, yet never identical to the
likenesses imagined when they think of themselves;
and where luminous women with irresistible smiles
think in African tongues and laugh loudly in public, look
you straight in the eye and in their accented Spanish
offer no explanation for the browning of Spain
The intelligent observer see ships every day
link Morocco and Algeria with Al-Andalus, their
sleek silhouettes mimic seabirds and dolphins,
their windows and lights and the curves of their hulls
a mosaic of facets which, distorted by water, make city
and the sea seem a shimmering collage taunting resident
and visitor with fragmented images of who he once was
and who she might become, but never an inkling of
who they are now!
Emanuel Carter
Church Bells
Once I lived in a charming English village, near
an ancient church, every Sunday morning
on my only day off, the bloody bells chimed.
Thought I saw a woman cycling to mass in
the mist, and it wasn´t Germaine Greer.
When Muslims ruled Andalusia, they tolerated
Christians, but a poet of that time -Ibn Baqi-
circa 1059 1112, wished they wouldn´t clang
bells so hard waking him up when air was cool,
sleep sweet and his Christian mistress had to
get up and go to mass. So far nothing has
changed, dear Ibn Baqi, the bells keep on tolling
She is a widow, never wanting to marry again, never defiling her vows,
her five children have moved to other parts of the United States;
and they seldom visit her, except on the very special season of Christmas,
when she adorns her home with garlands and lights to honor the Child Jesus...
Her name is Amelia, a petite lady from Andalusia,whose passion is writing poems,
and her Spanish accent is somewhat heavy, but the words are clear and precise;
on long summer's nights she speaks of her native land...meadows covered with camellias,
and tells tales of Columbus and the Conquistadors with feathered helmets...
She was quite beautiful in her younger days, daises in her dark, lustruos hair,
and sea-colored eyes that resembled the Mediterranean Sea, which brought her nostalgia;
and she often wore a folklorist costume of stripes of bright orange and yellow like her flag,
and now she's confined to a wheelchair looking sad...who has camellias for Amelia?
This past spring I planted a dozen of camellias plants in the empty and barren lawn,
hoping they would bloom when she would stare at the huge Atlantic Ocean;
and with eyes as sharp as a youngster, Amelia would see her beloved Spain,
and those lush meadows covered with camellias to bring her bitter-sweet pain.
In the quite hours of an early August' morning, Amelia rose to say her prayers,
and with the rosary in her devoted hands, she peaked outside and surprisingly smiled;
a beautiful garden of camellias appearing in front of her joyous eyes... she was so delighted,
but she couldn't go outside and caress them, but thought to herself, " Someone cares! "
Copyright 2009 by Andrew Crisci
The bus driver and a rowing boat
I remember a song “A slow boat to China”
There was a man a bus driver who took his wife on holiday to Spain
where his wife ran away with a shepherd
The bus driver went home alone but had the house which exploded
(a gas leak) when he sat on the loo; he was unharmed but somewhat
embarrassed. When the insurance money, came he bought a rowing boat
which had a mast and he could set sail when the wind was right.
He landed in Falmouth before the winter storms.
When spring came he rowed and sailed to the island of Neves where
he met John Cleeve, who wrote a funny article about the brave man
and suddenly the bus driver was famous.
The rich people in Neve gave him money which put in a bank
(there are so many banks) when he went to the bank to draw
out money for an ice-cream, he found he was a millionaire.
High finance is a mystery and something had gone wrong
not for him to ask questions, but he did transfer the money
to a Swiss bank and took the first plane back to Europe.
The bus driver is now a prosperous cattle farmer in Andalusia.
Larger than life, a will, governing the soul,
With a dash of colour under the fallen rainbow,
Enjoying the beauty of randomness through
Kismet and peace,
I peel my mundo intimo off the layers of memoirs of passion,
And I tend myself with no care towards the perspective of the inner life.
I hear it through the sound of a guitar, a gitano from Andalusia
strings soothingly together,
I hear the clandestine serpent of guilt howling rebellion
Inside of my labyrinth,
As if it were the home of the Minotaur, or a hellion.
Beating drums of sorrow foretell of desires hanging on boughs,
Before me, the solemn temple of will wrapped in its grandeur,
And I am idle, and I cannot move, and I do not want it!
It’s the silent whirlpool boiling time. Peace. Peace and quiet.
The horizons with no boundaries. Clarity everywhere.
In love –truth. In truth – fidelity. In life –direction.
But there was a concern lest the love becomes real,
What then? What to peel? How to peel?
Shall I be born, again? Shall I be born?
Let it play out, in time as the life marches on!
Rise along with me like the morning sun
At this time
What job I got at my hand
To rouse me like a nymph
Placing the tip of my lips
At the soft ear lobes and breathe hot
While you write love poems
Keeping your hands on your parts
Or make you sink in hate
Like the king Nero did
At the time when Rome was burning
Or keep a piece of stone chips
Under the tongue of this pen
And in front of the mirror practice
To deliver a fiery speech
Under the garb of freedom
And pit the races against each other;
Or make you travel Mongolia
Walk you on the rivers of Amazon
See you the sights of Spain and Andalusia
But I regret to say
This is not the proper time to plan
A honeymoon trip unnecessarily
Nightingales have stopped singing
And robins do not come out from their nest
As a war has been broken out everywhere
Among you
In your house
And among nations
Under the hunger of power and greed
Like mad dogs hounding and pounding
The ferocious creatures in disguise of human beings
The race of is dying
But this is not my job to tell you all
How man woman children are murdered
Raped, kidnapped and mutilated
All these things happen openly
And not unknown to anyone
I have great job this time to tell you
In the form of warning
Before I depart or drop writing
I see a plan, a plot woven out like web
By some evils at the behest of some so called chosen beasts
To enslave the entire race of man;
Now it is up to you
If you want to have a sound seep
Then along with me rise now like the morning sun.
The cream of the land has been
slain
And the jewels flushed in the
drain
Tell it not in Abeokuta
Neither publish it in Uromi
Lest the Ancestors hear
and be dumb
Lest the claws of horror glean in
their tomb.
Listen, you cursed bed of
Andalusia!
Let there be no gem nor laces
Be found draped further upon you.
For upon you the
jewel was lost.
You little wood of Lissa,
listen!
For being an accomplice to this
sin.
You have served a million invitation
hence,
To multitude of feet that shall
trudge upon your
silence.
Birds,unlike humans, can fly across the barriers
Avoid the checkpoints,need no identity papers, permits
Or gold stars.
Brothers,why were you separated?
Why could Palestine not be left as one
where ,as in Andalusia before the madness
of Inquisition,you lived together 500 years of peace
Until Christian conformity and suspicion
Tormented and killed you both?
It is we you should be fighting against
Not each other
Are you our own Roman Games?
You ,in the Arena we watch on our screens
We can turn them off but you,brothers and sisters,
are still there.And your children.
What remains for any of us?