Diary entry, Madrid, International Pride Weekend, 2017
Tourist lunch at three o’clock on the terrace,
but I’m not alone—a Russian to my right
speaks to me in Spanish–Rusia es un infierno,
allá a no se puede ser gay. He tells me of sinister ears
that listen for echoes of forbidden love,
their switchblades ready to shiv a body.
But all of this is far away. Today, we pilgrims dine
on scallops in their shells, watercress salad,
and peach gazpacho as the sky parades
across the Gran Vía, an awning of cobalt blue
over buildings white as wedding cake, cornices creamy as flan.
Love’s on all the billboards and gold armored
Super Woman straddles the bus stop,
so much iridescence, I forget my fractured foot.
We mambo through rainbows laced along the Retiro
and two-step into the Garden of Earthly Delights,
where swallows burst through pink eggshells
and Adam plops down as though stupefied on the grass.
God, dressed in red velvet robes, stares at us
as he holds Eve’s wrist and takes her pulse.
We shed our clothes— drag queens expose
their statuesque torsos, and I reveal my pale potbelly,
my breasts like empty soup bowls. Here,
shame has drifted out to sea in a soap bubble.
Naked together, we are whippoorwills circling fountains
frothing with limonada, sangría, tinto de verano.
We are owls with pineapples on our heads,
symbolizing nothing, fizzing with delight.
––Christine Swint
In honor of Pride Month, I’m posting this poem that I wrote a few years ago after returning from my second camino in Spain.
The poem is based on real life events in Madrid, and also the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a tryptic that encompasses heaven, hell, and earthly paradise.
If I can ever get myself to focus and complete this project, the plan is to place this poem at the end of my manuscript about the camino. It’s shaping up to be a nice size for a chapbook, about 28 pages of poems written in the epistolary style and consisting of letters, messages, notes, and diary entries.
I love the poems in this manuscript, and I really need to finish the project and bring it to fruition. It’s more fun to keep making new poems, but it’s not fair to the work to keep it squirreled away in drawers and on my laptop.
I hope you like this poem. It’s central message is to live with delight and for shame to “drift out to sea in a soap bubble.”
Be proud of your way of loving. No one can tell you how or who to love. And know that if you’re reading this poem and identify as LGBTQIA, which is probably most of the entire world, I am sending you love through this poem!
Balanced On the Edge 