Gail Langstroth: Two Poems

Antonio Machado Found Dead Crossing the Pyrenees, 1939

In his jacket pocket
nine Spanish words:
these blue skies and
this sun of my youth.

What would I write
before my crossing?

What I see
from the cab window,
what I meet as I walk
to the corner café for
croissant and hot milk-coffee?

A split-shadow on the granite wall
shapes fronds into dark wings.
On the cement walk a little girl teeters
with her thin dog zippered
into a lavender-colored dog coat—
the bell
on her doll’s red and white-
striped stocking cap reminds:

six months from now,
Christmas.
But today the rains have stopped—
sun in Sao Paolo.


~



early, wheat, honey, Sanlúcar, Spain


I sit on a straight-backed
white wood chair

the back bedroom
Charo’s Sanlúcar home

I need
village life with its

bleached jasmine patios
long pastures with horse

bull the sea
near the fountain

stops as shrill
bat shadows pierce

saffron silence I need
crawling

cloud claws
blunt

midnight bells—
like the baker

I knead—

temprano / trigo / miel /
memory into loaves

Copyright 2023 Gail Langstroth

Gail Langstroth is an international eurythmy performer, translator, poet and film artist. In 2020, Get Fresh Books released Langstroth’s bilingual firegarden / jardín-de-fuego.  In October 2023, Before Now / After I, an exhibition of Langstroth’s visual art opens in Hamburg, Germany.