My foot strides again, over even regular municipal cobbles.
Oh that we had time for civic pride, dear Melo.
Catching up my mind’s eye,
breath-taking,
aghast, imagination fails
and;

The non accommodating cafe chairs now suffice;
for although reclining cats
by the ‘Castelo’ passage
still pose,
the grid and a currency of electrons became useless that night
of the furnace wind.
Not that they needed mobile telecoms the felines, just Bombeiros.
The cats needed mobility, too close to the fire, fur!

It strikes me hard, the light, the dark
and many shades convergent.
Not so subliminal, charcoal.
You can have it back now, your town
‘any colour,
so long as it’s black’,
or, ashen grey at a pinch!
Torches, hairbrushes, a table, art, tool handles, wind up radios, pencils.
All, or most, Incendiary food,
need I say more?

Another cuddle with a scruffy friend some consolation,
as we navigate now primeval carbonised slopes.
Ruefully I survey a spot with forested mountainsides,
between night barking dogs and intimacy.
Charred, jet black giesta stubs adorn the place,
where I might have called it forest home.

That arson night the accelerant intoxicated forest,
rained incandescent offerings,
on the innocent in their nightclothes.
The firestorm proclaimed, ‘Trajectory Lottery’;
have a tidy roof over your head? – Not any more!
And still we my gentle watchers and I are knowing of quiet celestial bodies and fiery characters, all in time and rotation.
Good people, not perfect, but good, struggle.

The remote prospect of novel non-religious house front tiling,
seems to recede, just a little,
In the sooty face of trauma.
No space in the stable this season.
Actually, no stable.
Give me a hammer with a shaft in situ, nails.
Oh, and yes, timber, again.
Then stable.

Auto-estrada,
autopista,
autoroute,
Autobahn, this time
compass pivots north-east,
but, will swing back, again.

Jonathan O’Farrell