The Bus to Grenada
Past brown hills circular and drawn
and olive trees that seem stenciled on the earth in rows,
we ride toward Granada. The woman in front of me
reads celebrity magazines, portraits of the stars —
Don Johnson, Britt Ekland — and the woman behind
beats her fan at regular intervals, the driver
hearing the news which tells us of Iraq, Kuwait
and Iran, and the soldiers stationed even now
on the deserts to the east. Past apartment projects
Mediterranean style and landfills of garbage, past
sluices of water and farming towns we follow
each zig-zag of the road south to the Sierra Nevadas
and the mountains rise before us like the tiles of Moorish
blue whose unbroken pattern professes a constancy
history can no longer promise.
​
from A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979 – 1992 by Walter Holland © 1992