Poem for the Day: Where the Clouds Fall over Barcelona

Where the Clouds Fall over Barcelona

               For Geoff, Page and Gemma

It is a long journey to enter the streets

of Barcelona from a 200 year-old villa.

In the Sagrada Familia, an eye-opening

space, we see marble, carved columns, statues,

hear organ pipes echoing to frescoed domes, lit ceilings.

In Gaudi’s cathedral, the structure is incomprehensible,

a life’s work, still ongoing much like the queues

at entry point.

In amongst the chatter and Spanish smiles,

we take the lift to where the clouds fall over Barcelona,

where the wind buffets open windows and

reaches our awe-inspiring gaze.

From our rising to the sky, then to silent contemplation,

we descend to see the rotund buds

Gaudi shaped as heads of lavender, not

the heads of Saints.

One gift shop after another, we find the museum.

Plaques record his early life, his early inspiration.

And nowhere more distinct, in this little room,

are the gifts he gave; nature as bounty, nature as art,

a bees’ honeycomb of circular windows looking to God.

When we leave our cheerful faces show our pleasure,

though an incident on the way  is a harder grip in the train.

A pickpocket cagey in his devil-may-care,

moves away as one of our party points, stares.

He’s no Cathedral worker, no architect, or priest,

just a body hunkered into the arc of himself

toeing the floor amongst a wall of faces,

vanishing finally 

on our monumental day.