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NauenThen

Spain Poem (part III)

III. Women & Poets See the Truth Arrive

Barcelona: New Orleans meets San Francisco meets Paris meets Berlin… on the Mediterranean!

The Palace of Music, a library of women’s studies, the Cultural Center of Catalan history where we have thick hot chocolate and Merce explains she isn’t a “Catalonia über alles” patriot

She tells of Sundays on the Ramblas as a little girl, birds and hamster in cages. Bullets once pocked the churches, blood pooled on the stones, horses lay dead. You wouldn’t see this today unless you knew about Spain’s 1930s “little world war.”

Churches cost to enter, but her favorite is free today for a wedding. The bride wears orange high heels.

Cork trees with swaths unrolled midtrunk

I manage to eat on Spanish time—10 p.m.
endless vegetarian small plates
Café del Sol on Plaza del Sol

Band in the square of Saint Joan plays Spanish folk rock
even the punk girls can’t
sustain gloom face

You wish for the tension of war
“go tell your countries what you saw in Spain”
while I wish for the excitement of commerce

But what about me?
another tinto for me!

Maybe it’s just a wine cooler
but it’s the drink for me!

The rocky Costa Brava
“frontier of Europe, the tideless sea”
I sink to my ankles with every step

why has it not worn to powder?
I contemplate Homer & the Phoenicians
too sunny to be winedark

they only had the words black, white & red
How did anyone come up with setting off in a ship?
Who thought up music?

“The Spanish Civil War is still very much present in the mind of everyone. My mother was born in 1936, the year the war started, and everyone knows which side their family was on…”

Parc Güell—Gaudí’s idea of an English village but never lived in. This is Robyn’s place. She disappears to be alone with it.

Gaudí believed a roof’s elements didn’t have to be ugly so he sculpted the vents, chimneys, & stairwell covers of La Pedrera (“the quarry”) into totems & espanta bruixes (witch scarers)

I drink from the fountain that ensures I’ll return to Barcelona.
Alisa & Robyn don’t.
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