Zaragoza Dusk

For Reuben Woolley

 

We last spoke of wrens singing moments after Armistice

dotting sky like a blue egg they returned from the baroque earth

and made globe shaped nests with splays of khaki and hardy gorse.

 

You told me that you always preferred brutalist sculptures

how Coventry rose from the ashes not as a phoenix but as man

he came from Krakow, County Armagh to build the great grey bird.

 

You told me that in Zaragoza the oranges are dull as they should be,

that they are full of pips and grow like stanzas in the silt of a dreamer’s mind

you dropped a C-bomb on an unsuspected crowd and a poem exploded meaning.

 

Upon hearing of your death, I saw twenty-two children chasing a white ball,

they reminded me how words looked scattered in your poems

one of the boys never celebrated his goal and I felt you there.

 

Tonight, in Zaragoza the sky looks nothing special and you would like that.

Tonight, on the Ebro are fireflies knitting light into the neon unnoticed

they are of the dark, of the other world. They emit your lights.

Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com