by Ann Robinson
While travel is restricted we can conjure up a place in the imagination. Here’s how a poet visits faraway places while staying close to home.
What concerns me now is a lemon,
Split through the center.
A yellow basin,
The walk on both sides,
A bitter landscape,
But free to talk.
My lips intimate with it,
Glad for the gift of silence,
I see better without speaking.
I follow a daily ritual,
Strolling Barcelona’s curving
Cobbled streets.
Strangers have followed me,
What I press to my mouth
Recalls them.
Imagination is a distant soil.
I tell you all because it doesn’t matter.
I have never traveled to Spain, but feel
Spain’s unforgiving heat
in my backyard, among sparrows
And yucca and a lemon tree.
Ann Robinson retired from civil service after twenty five years and owns a farming operation with her sister in Arkansas. Her most recent book of poems, Stone Window, was released in 2014.
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Stone Window by Ann Robinson
