Rain Like Pizarro In Peru

[Bernie01]

Version 2:

We scuff in the ancient dirt,
and almost ancient ourselves
we poke for Inca trinkets, dented
stone spoons.

Once we found a tattoo frieze
on bricks.

High in the Andes we serve
ourselves a breakfast of boiling,
chicory.

Peru spills below our wrinkled tent
like a Matisse pastel.

At that altitude there is little oxygen,
but we didn't seem to mind. Corn cobs
for supper carried by our guide, potatoes
small as a boy's fist. Mountain water.

The guide didn't like us and rarely spoke.
He stayed by himself.

Three weeks into our defacto divorce.
Arguments or worse only minutes away.

Terraced hillsides like a British garden.
Tufts of rough brown grass, steep climbs
that left us exhilarated and exhausted.

The night cold and unbearably clear.
We spy on stars until falling asleep.
Frequent showers call us by name.

We trace some of Pizarro's path.
The children, the llamas, the stones
do not remember him.

Low clouds, we descend, a solitary
jaguar looks back, yellow as gold
in pouring rain.








Original:

Jaguars, at vista
points, alas,

mountain redoubts
like Pizzaro in Peru.

Quetzels overhead
sip rainwater. Fly.

I find dented Inca
stuff, stone spoons,

trinkets, a tattoo
frieze on bricks.

I ship to the US,
Peru empties out

now that the
warriors are gone.

A solitary jaguar
looks back,

yellow as gold
in pouring rain.

[BobBradshaw]

This one didn't grab me emotionally like your other poems....though I like the closing stanza the best.

[Bernie01]

Bob---

agreed, but i hope the subject interests the reader.

A revised pom now posted here.


thanks,

bernie

[BobBradshaw]

Yeah, this is good...a lot of good descriptions immerse me in the landscape....the boiling water, the low oxygen, the small scraps of food, the solitary guide....I like the closing even better now, the solitary jaguar following the stanza about the landscape's loss of memory, how we're all forgotten....which after the tension between the couple makes this line especially poignant:

The night cold and unbearably clear

[Bernie01]

Bob---

thanks for stopping back and the comment.


lucinda williams,,,maybe she works for you....sure does for me. she is a wonderful poet, frank, original and powerful lines with emotional force.



here, she thinks about a former lover, i'll get over you, over time....she sings...


bernie

[FranktheFrank]

I like it, the second version, you bring your old way of writing
yet it is different somehow, more like my own.
I liked how you introduced the British garden.

I am impressed with how you developed the poem, the first version so succinct
but some poems we like so much we want it to run into prose.

I enjoyed the story telling and the magic letters.
You introduce disharmony and we are sad, but it is what it is,
that's life. The jaguar at the end seems so apt.

I have read poems from poets who live there
I prefer this, much better.

[Billy]

Like this, Bernie, but I would end this with the next to the last stanza:

We trace some of Pizarro's path.
The children, the llamas, the stones
do not remember him.

[Bernie01]

Frank---

your comments, always so helpful to me.

and the poet from peru i prefer,

poet Cesar Vallejo

October 1936 - Poem by Cesar Vallejo

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
from all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange
alley of the Moon makes a turn,
my death goes away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one.

And I move away from everything, since everything
remains to create my alibi:
my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud
and even the bend in the elbow
of my own buttoned shirt.

Cesar Vallejo


Billy---

will reconsider, but i am fond of that lone jaguar. wonder either of us can state a rule for inclusion or otherwise. animals, so conventional. animals easily manipulated by the writer...what is the major focus, animals or people?

can the point be made in a better way....?


here, i hope the animal confronts this hapless, quarreling couple. a silent confrontation.

a silent remonstrant.

i don't know a way to make this more stark...we have flashed on the screen in the place of the jaguar a historical monument, graveyard, historical date....etc...


will see. glad you stopped by.

bernie