Lisbon

I

Waves batter the sandy shoreline
In this Golden Gate of Europe,
Where history ebbs and floods.

A statue resembling the Redeemer in Rio
Directs the westward pedestrians,
As streetcars stroll astride cobblestones.

This city still lingers in memory
Of the Age of Discovery,
When diamonds emigrated from Brazil

To the old country, traded in for a language
That frames the Catholic saints.
In São Paulo, those tildes make waves.

II

Then one All Saints Day, an earthquake
Sent tremors and fires through the city,
And tidal waves bounding up from the shore.

The crooked streets of rumors and lies,
Were awoken in the illuminated night,
And rebuilt in a modern grid of boulevards.

Between these ramparts and bulwarks,
Castelo São Jorge shelters the scene,
Survived the flames, beat back the Moors.

That remaining maze of alleys in the old town,
Runs tawny along houses of red clay rooves
Where cadences of fado echo in the night,

Melancholy folk with mandolins
Sing sad shanties of lost loves and fate,
Wield guitars with sauntered Iberian gait.

This is the only city I know of with a lift,
That elevates between eras – the old and the new.
This city that elevated itself out of a dark age.

St. Anthony’s song of what was lost,
An empire of centuries of liquid capital
Overlooking the Tagus and the sea.