For the second Writing 201 Poetry assignment, I submit another slightly reworked poem from 20 years ago, shortly after I moved to Brazil. This comes from a period when I was not only grappling with nostalgia but also transitioning from prose poetry to free verse.

Nostalgia

Most things I have loved and learnt must now be left behind. The smell of rain on cut spring grass. The sun ghosted by mist. The black silhouettes of trees temporarily dead. The cold prehistoric sea. Vowels damp as clumps of rotting leaves in Autumn woods. Final consonants like snaps of wind or ice. The melancholy of the present perfect.

Learnt without work. Loved without guilt or duress.

*

Now the sky is almost always blue. Vowels clear and cardinal. The warm sea more womb than stone. Plants more flags than things. Flags planted like trees. Time without season; days without mood. Learning everything anew without the anchorage of first being small and close to the earth and inching year by year further from it. Beginning with the insignificant detail; rising to the overview.

Here everything was first seen from the air: the dim low-voltage street-lights; the mud colored shanties; tower blocks like broken teeth. Elevation gives way to declension.

*

Now in this carnival of sudden novelty I must bid farewell to the meat of things. Feast myself on confetti, confections, icing, bunting; mere vocabulary.