PORTO
I am walking on cobblestones
The colour of mackerel skin,
Past houses painted
Watermelon pink
And caramel yellow,
Beneath trees the colour of dried parsley
And churches the colour of clifftops.
Balconies of port red and cedar green
Project from art nouveau façades
The colour of grilled sardine flesh,
The colour of salted almonds,
The colour of the weather –
All the weather of the river,
All the weather of the sea.
Here and there a Delft blue
Cries out from the seventeenth century,
Here and there a circling gull
Cries out from an infinitely old new world.
By Jonathan Steffen
First published in ‘The Colour of Love’, Acumen Publications 2011.
