Biography
Hi, I'm James and I live in Madrid. I love writing poetry and fiction and am currently looking for Spanish poets writing in English for an upcoming anthology I am going to edit and publish. I write fiction and have published a few books in a series called Shakespeare's Moon and a series of graded readers for native Spanish speakers called Cognate Books.
Waiting For You
These pre-dawn walks in the rain to maybe see you in the class. I think hard about what to wear; harder about how to act. How perfect you are in the dawn: we are strangers still, gone with the day - then another week to wait. I only feel the cold when you don't come - do you feel the same? Do you miss me when I'm not there? The others never change but your dark, sleepy eyes and wet hair make me want to wake up with you - maybe I should tell you - but how? I plan all week. At home, happy, strange - is this what love feels like? This waiting? And then I'm coming to you again through the rain - praying you'll be there: praying I see that look in your eye - that you want me to be yours like I need you to be mine. We meet in the darkness; we'll always live in this happy gloom, in this city of red lights and strangers, of blocks and shops and clocks. Yes, we'll always have this distance, this wet romance, this spark of hope - but we'll never be able to buy back that time. That waiting time.
A Visit To Tita Carmen
She's one hundred and three and I'm her time machine showing her pictures on the strange machine I keep in my pocket which she sees and says, 'Oh! That's me!' What do I say when she asks where the dead are? Her sister? All her friends? (I say 'they're at home' and she nods, satisfied). I hold her hand which trembles, which once knitted sleeves she held a tape to, needles in her pursed lips, looking at me as my grandmother cooed and said, 'It fits!' Once she was a girl, like this tree she planted was a seed. Her roots are the deepest of the family knitted to the foundations of our old house built as she looked on, holding her mother's hand, bound to a time that's slipped away its music now passé, its fashions in yellowing magazines, its hopes and dreams in me somewhere, like her. Like family. Like the sea we all once crawled from. The elm towers beside me and I water these plants she first showed me when I was young, on holiday from the city. She was and is my great aunty - a lay-nun, a traveller, a business woman, sister to my grandmother who was once young and sang like a sparrow in the dripping dawn. Her song lives on in the old woman's dream I interrupt with shouted questions and my phone screen. With her I am a girl again. Outside, wife and mum. Inside, I'm old - hot flushes, white streams in my hair - to my husband I am beautiful, he says. 'How was your aunty?' Deaf. Quiet. Different. The same. I look up: the rain has stopped and my children come running.
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
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