| Three poems from Sella by Terry Gifford published in ISLE 19:3, Summer 2012 May Drum-rolling thunder, shuddering lightning, painful ice-balls pound the fiesta paellas simmering like summer in the Plaza Mayor. Long days of roof-rain echo down the streets, then night-mists creep up on the village like urbanisations round Relleu, ghostly white dreams, or nightmares, rising from the coast.
Some think of their swelling green almonds, some hear, far off, their casita cisterne’s rising note in the dark bell of the well coiling upwards to tempt a summer serpent. Amable still says, ‘It’s not enough! There was water for four mills here once!’ With his gun he’ll guard his wild asparagus.
But some, somehow, knew this was coming, who remembered the old calendar from Alcoy brought by the blind man over Puerto de Tudons who would ask on the fifth day of August each year for someone to look at the moon - was it clear, or was it cloud-closed, or was there a hint of hail falling in May?
La Pileta The ‘washing bowl’ we enter over its lip poised above the village swimming pool from whose cool August blue we gazed up into that barren maw of iron jaws, safe in the softer element, its splashes, children, mothers.
But to enter that water carved bowl is to find cool deep shade under flawless curves, the iron gates of an old corral, heaven, haven, home of the old goat- woman no card- players now remember, except in their dreams.
We climb on over broken bancals, carrying baby pines for planting under the highest wall where, behind a screen of brambles water drips into a bowl calcified onto its altar of rocks, fringed with green ferns.
Drink from the rock. Anoint your head. Eat now the olive- bread, the oranges. Turn, clean, dig, plant the pinos for protection from this sliding slope for the children of those lovers who opened the box and signed the book of La Pileta.
The Forgotten Valley for Christopher North Between the eagle and the orchid, the nightingales orchestrated the air across the river with elaborate clarity.
Between the overgrown, unwalked valley (eagle escaping us) and the scruffy abandoned terraces of blackened trees (Ophrys scolopax almost escaping us), the tall, fluttering poplars (their duet inescapable from invisible voiceboxes).
Between the airborne unexpected and the boot level unexpected, the seasonal gift for a damp day, low cloud forcing the choice of walk below the village.
Between the giving and the receiving, between the gliding and the still, between the eagle and the orchid, full attention, open heartedness, small joys all round, all around, always.
[Title poem of a sequence published in Earthlines No 2, November 2012] Crushing the Bluebells Across the emerald meadow grazed to the stillness of stars, over the rattling stone wall with awkward anticipation another line deliciously crossed, among the boulders and bracken the soft dimples and dells of the earth-mother’s back clothed only by bluebells ringing each its blue note , where to lie, not how to love, gave us only a moment’s pause.
Los Balcones, Alicante
Elegant balconies under taller palms eluding the heavily equipped Guardia Civil, But they are earplugs to earnest commerce: Balconies are blinds to public life,
https://thegalwayreview.com/2019/07/28/terry-gifford-two-poems/ Fuchsias fulminated in the hedgerows, The Bens were receding behind us green curraghs, launches and fishing boats, in the form of MacDara’s offertory, where English voices crossed a cloth white robed priests spoke a mass
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