Two Poems

TO STEPHEN

(for stephen spender)

last entry today

detached touch remembered,

your words kiss my strange future

which i decode

with scattered verse on a burnt page

echo wisdom,

echo your lived story

worlds within worlds

war within memories of wars

half-prayers picked up among lost flowers

holiday verse read

under Berlin summers

sun burnt poet-friend

against black storming Fascism

I-camera of nothingness guided you

and in this today,

I too sit on a Berlin bench

eighty years ahead caught by your pylon words

all afternoon i wondered

when you looked down at your

steps taken on dirt to pacify poetry

did you prepare some mist-riddled tomorrow…I read now?

DEPARTURES

(el salvador revisited)

All the required objects

were there in my memory:

worn out shoes, old photos, tattered letters

postcards sent

Our room empty of goodbye

cobwebs and the sea

lapping endlessly…