EXTREMADURA POEMS

SAN FELIPE – Poetry by Lee Anne Sittler

Don’t watch the blooms make love, the visual screams they make, incongruous, dissonant, cantankerous spirits cascading into cloud wisps, re-forming around María trapped in her chapel. María, don’t watch too closely, in summer, the children swimming in the river; the white houses lapping over the river’s edge like abandoned kittens. Don’t watch the sun picking Romanians picking cherries; don’t hang on with your eyes, from your hill, from this wavering ark, marooned in your valley. I can feel your eyes boring through walls. I know it can’t be you slurring names into the wind.

EXTREMADURA’S SOUL – Poetry by Elizabeth Tyler

Dryness, nothingness, lifeless. A vast expanse of wasteland stretches to the horizon. Heat-scorched grass, faded, embodies death. Grey and ghastly beneath the dust, lingering in the unforgiving wind. Heavy silence hovers eerily over the space. Dancing somberly with the shivering sun-waves. Beaten-down trails run for miles like empty veins. Offering no life-blood to the destitute plain. One crater, moon-like, is a flicker of hope. A soul without a body, lonely under the spartan sky. Carrier of cool though tasteless vitality, water. Allotting a meager allowance of fulfillment to willful survivors. Sparsely dotted evergreen oaks provide scant shade. Cattle make their way toward the sweet fragrance of the life-giver. Desiccated breath drawn in unison. A reluctant note of optimism in a hollow chord. Scraped from a doomed-to-failure land, futile. Life finds a way.