Lorraine Caputo – Sparks of Calliope

El Convento de San Francisco

A fortress façade of white-trimmed grey,
the bell towers with three stilled bells,
the doors shut against the heat of mid-day.

Within we walk, through the old convent.
After 450 years, it is now a school,
the green blackboards with faded chalk writings –
lessons of language and history,
the hymn of Nicaragua,
bars and sharps and words
woven across the space.
Within one sala,
upon a blue-bordered porcelain plaque:
Bartolomeo de las Casas
Defender of the Indians
Resided in this room
In the year 1536.

Past the weed-covered courtyard
with hoopless basketball courts,
is a collection
of pre-Columbian statues
raided from the islands
in the lake a few blocks away,
now protected behind a fence,
covered by a red-tiled roof.
Time-worn,
weather-worn,
forgotten in this aged place –
no-one has been here for a long, long while.
Leaves blown in upon the tiled floor,
signs askew on their pedestals.
The faces of dead heroes and images
of crocodiles, jaguars and eagles
gaze across the half-ruined compound.

Dissolving Into the Silence

Again this morning
I awoke too quickly

I tried to gather
the fraying threads
the tenuous chords
of my dreams

but already they had
dissolved
into the predawn
silence

Lorraine Caputo is a wandering troubadour whose poetry appear in over 400 journals on six continents, and 23 collections – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. Her writing has been honored by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada and nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her adventures on facebook or on her website here.

Mountain Odyssey

These thin, ragged roads,
pocked, torturously scraped ‘cross
mountains, deep valley

villages awaiting
our plunge into those folds &
don Chato’s ribald song,

our swaying through their
hamlets, their pueblos, along
that bouldered river.

The Eastern Cordillera

I.

Dawn reveals thick streams serpentining through the páramo.
Light-grey clouds move with the land.
Solitary homes sink into the barren-brown scape gouged by
dried quebradas & caves, brightened by fields of onion.

Two men in heavy wool ponchos talk at a roadside stand.
A girl with a wind-burnt face waits, schoolbooks in hand.
Her thin blond hair flies in the slight breeze.

Wind-eroded stone juts from the leached earth streaked
with pale-blood soil. Herbage finds tenuous hold.

II.

An olive-fatigue soldier brushes his teeth at a hose.
On the porch of a store, another, rifle over shoulder,
speaks with a young, coquettish woman.

By the cloud-entombed road that wends across these
heaven-raking mountains, buzzards hunt along the ground
near a sand-bagged post hidden beneath a drab tarp.

Lorraine Caputo is a wandering troubadour whose poetry appear in over 250 journals on six continents, and 18 collections – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Escape to the Sea (Origami Poems Project, 2021). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. In 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honored her verse. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her adventures at www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer or http://latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.

Tag: Lorraine Caputo

Two Poems by Lorraine Caputo