Skip to main content

Barcelona: a poetry post


Last summer we gave our neighbours a gift and swapped homes for a little while with a lovely family who lived in Barcelona. They had a great time exploring Scotland and getting to know our neighbours while we enjoyed being hot in Barcelona.

 It was incredibly hot, there was a reason the Barcelonians wanted to escape to Scotland, but we enjoyed making friends with their kitten and chilling out in their gorgeous home in the day time, going out in the evening when the heat was more tolerable to explore gorgeous Barcelona.


Things we loved most were: 

 Seeing La Sagrada Familia - we didn't go inside because the kids didn't want to, but there's a great play park behind it where we watched parrots fly and admired the building.

 Shopping around Las Ramblas - so much fun and lots of silly little shops. The area has a reputation for pickpockets but we were fine with our purses tucked away.

 The CosmoCaixa museum - this was a fantastic visit, we adored the museum which had so much to do and to interest the kids and us. BTW it's a science museum with some awesome live animals too.
Anyhow, with all that time that we were hanging out in the house waiting for the temperature to come down a bit I did bucketloads of writing, including writing Sonnet 404 which appeared in the first issue of 404 Ink's Magazine, and writing this poem about our experience of Barcelona which appeared in Allegro Poetry's travel special in December last year.
Barcelona
Cosmo Caixa


Clearly a mistake
to leave the cool green,
admittedly wet,
summer of soggy,
beautiful Scotland.
Exchanging our home for another
in August heatwave-heavy
Barcelona.

We lived like vampires.
Hiding in shuttered rooms
from infernal sun.
Emerging at dusk
to a city alive with people:
hearts beating fast
as sweat evaporates
in sweltering dark.

A gorgeous mistake.
Catalonian colour and vibrant lights.
Layers of truths told
in art and architectural splendour.
In the light of the fountain
the kids danced
for wind, for green,
for the rain's sweet kiss.
Home.

Thinking about it now, I'm wondering how I managed to get all that writing time. There's always more time when you're in someone else's house! Today I've been trying to write this and get the house tidied up and I've been distracted by one thing or another all day! Tomorrow will have to be the day we get the house tidied up... or I could just pretend that I'd tidied it and the kids have trashed it again - it's going to happen anyway!

 I'm sharing this poem with Prose for Thought (I'm afraid I can't find the picture link thing), because I haven't joined in there for ages (for so long that I've lost track of when it is!) and with The Prompt, because although our Barcelona experience was odd, it was very happy indeed, and happy is the word of the fortnight.

mumturnedmom
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February update!

  Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries  came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry  - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate!  Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...
2 comments
Read more

discovering Iain Crichton Smith

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...
1 comment
Read more