After walking the Caminho Portugues to Santiago de Compestela, we walked in A Coruña, Coimbra, and Porto.
Tales of Three Cities
- A Coruña
Galicia has A Coruña
John Lennon still strums there.
Hero Hercules, Poseidon
Guard the old harbor where
Intruders ran up to the fair
Crowned city, deep cisterned,
Now framed in new white tower.
***
Surfers stoked forever,
Cut and hang to the end of the earth,
Aquarium, that is.
***
That strong Tower of Hercules
The Menhires de Paz,
Invite us to the human family.
- Coimbra
City of Coimbra smoky
From wild forest fires
Borders the Rio Mondego
With spuming, shooting gyres
Day and night. The Black-caped students
Force the newbies to wear
Soda cans, faculty dresses,
Carry turnips all day
As they beg from us passersby.
Strolling to class, they glide
On courts of King Dom Dinis.
Burning of their ribbons
Serenata Monumental
A Queima das Fitas
Soaked students in silence listen
to mandolins, singers
With crazed cheers of young blood grads.
Escaped from academic prison
They cherish their books whose careless
Destruction merited
Maximum punishment in kind,
Maximum wisdom lost.
Leather-bound books guarded by bats
Eating the wormy insects.
***
Chapel of St. Michael resounds
Spookily, with Latin
Hymns of refulgence to godly Kings
Shining in cloistered tombs.
***
Convento de Santa Clara
With Santa Isabel
Wife of King Dom Dinis, resting
Place for the patron saint
of Coimbra. At only age
Twelve she married ,suffered,
Under Dinis, austere, jealous
Mad when she gave golden
Coins to needy, sick, orphaned children.
Disguised in a basket,
Gold coins had turned to roses
When Dinis searched his Queen.
Dinis dead in 1325,
She gave her remaining
Wealth to the poor, and a poor Clare,
Lived, prayed, died in Convento
Santa Clara. A painting shows
Royal gold and roses.
To Santiago she journeyed
Pilgrim, walking, hidden.
Hospitals, schools, and albergues
Were the roses she gave.
A Peacemaker who stopped her son
and her husband’s warring.
Reinha Santa Isabel!
***
Quinta das Lagrimas, Garden
Of Tears, the mournful park
of Dona Inès de Castro.
Beautiful daughter, she
Descended from a Galician nobleman.
The eye of Dom Pedro
Spied her, married her, queened her.
Fearing Spain’s influence
From her Galician connection,
Pedro’s father, King Afonso,
Forbade the marriage. So in secret
Inès and Pedro wed.
Paranoid and mad, Afonso
Had her murdered right there
Near the Spring where they used to kiss.
A poem graven in stone
Records their love, and her death, now.
***
Portugal dos Pequenitos
Little houses, little
Monuments, little pavilions.
Evoking colonies
Crushed and enslaved by Portugal–
Brazil, Macau, Goa
East Timor and Mozambique
Azores and Madeira
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde
Sao Tomé y Principe
With Equatorial Guinea.–
Challenge us with statues
Flaunt weapons, artifacts and dolls,
Tribal relics, plundered.
***
Funky street art everywhere
Tags on muraled bridges,
Passageways, walkways tunneling
Untouched and unpoliced.
Flora and fauna of the streets,
Brotherhoods of spray cans,
Botanicals near coursing,
Aqueduct– Coimbra
Sempre velha sempra nova!
- Porto
City of the Discoverer
Henry Navigator,
Porto ushers Rio Douro
From Jardim do Moro.
Walking Ponte de Dom Luis,
I flow with the crowds and tram.
Promontory of Colina da Sé
Accessed by steps, I float,
Smooth funicular lowering
Down to the riverside.
Cais da Ribeira, for me
World’s most beautiful street.
***
Torre de Clérigos, landmark
Outside our hotel with
Noisy buses and shrill students
Drinking out in the street
Every single night to five-thirty.
Cleaners out by six A. M..
***
Art and mathematics depend
On each other, turning
Parabolically around,
Cleaving the marble slab.
***
Portuguese Center for Photos
Housed in an old prison
Shows life among the prisoners
Color and black and white
Testimonies of their humanity,
Their bad sides all hidden.
TV replaces their reading
Of books, lying untouched.
Interior life diluted.
No Malcolm X, Nelson
Mandela here. “It is better
This way. Tranquillity.
Docile and Amenable all.
They’re useful idiots.”
Upstairs, overlooking Porto,
Obsolete cameras
Recorded the world as inner
Eye courting landscapes.
***
Aeons of rocks, sheltered pathways
Burst onto rocks and waves,
Beckoning to me and to you.
Freedom, the Atlantic.