SIMON PARKER
  • Home
  • Blog
  • POETRY
    • Three Poems from Three Years
    • Eve
    • Via Dolorosa
    • a disappearing
    • Unfolding
    • Street Scene
    • Said and done
    • Ingres and Delacroix share a coffee
    • If you follow the silk road
    • In him we trust
    • n.b. for Barney
    • Who Can Erase The Traces?
  • Theatre
    • Aching Parts
    • Mooring
    • The Right Kind of Violence
    • Vex
    • Take me to where the arrows no longer fall
    • Yellow Fever
    • Own Goal
    • Just Like Flies
    • Snap
    • Home
  • Fictions
    • Gross
    • The 7.22
    • For Those Who Trespass
    • Karaoke
    • We Only Notice When It's Gone
    • This is a story that I am going to make a story out of
    • Les Anglais en Vacances
    • She
    • La Comedie Humaine
  • LIVEWORKS
    • Watching Coriolanus at the National Theatre
    • Watching Phaedra at the National Theatre
    • Notes from a wanderer
  • News
  • Contact
Said and done
​For Felix

Once I read a poem
by one of your countrymen
Nicolás Guillién.
You knew it by heart and bellowed
Si me lo hubieran dicho
We laughed, searched each other’s eyes
for the depths of friendship, ours.

This poem, a beating heart laid bare
spoke of the conditional despair
of our corrugated existence
how love loses its way
in the disordered unfolding of lives.
Two friends, soldered
who shared poems

joy’s tears, Silvio Rodriguez
Moros y Cristianos
flew pedalling through Havana.
Our damp bodies hugged
undying friendship held
to our breasts
needing no poet’s lament.


​Now, I can’t find that poem
and I’m not sure whether it was written
by Nicolás, Jorge, Rafael
or any Guillién at all
or what it really said about those two friends.
I would ring you, or send you an email
but I no longer know where you live.
When all is said and done
I know I can look through this window
holding my book of Spanish verse
certain only that the weather will change
and as Rafael Guillién answers
                                                                   ¿Destino?
¡ Oh absoluto Presente!




© Simon Parker
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Blog
  • POETRY
    • Three Poems from Three Years
    • Eve
    • Via Dolorosa
    • a disappearing
    • Unfolding
    • Street Scene
    • Said and done
    • Ingres and Delacroix share a coffee
    • If you follow the silk road
    • In him we trust
    • n.b. for Barney
    • Who Can Erase The Traces?
  • Theatre
    • Aching Parts
    • Mooring
    • The Right Kind of Violence
    • Vex
    • Take me to where the arrows no longer fall
    • Yellow Fever
    • Own Goal
    • Just Like Flies
    • Snap
    • Home
  • Fictions
    • Gross
    • The 7.22
    • For Those Who Trespass
    • Karaoke
    • We Only Notice When It's Gone
    • This is a story that I am going to make a story out of
    • Les Anglais en Vacances
    • She
    • La Comedie Humaine
  • LIVEWORKS
    • Watching Coriolanus at the National Theatre
    • Watching Phaedra at the National Theatre
    • Notes from a wanderer
  • News
  • Contact