New Poetry by Phoebe Power

from Book of Days

The following is an extract from a long poem recounting a journey along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. This extract describes the final few days of the walk.

38

from Melide

PLEASE HELP I HAVE
WALKED HERE FROM ENG-
LAND WITH NO MONEY
NOW I AM TRAPPED.
FOOD OR MONEY PLEASE.
WE ARE IN 2 TENTS WITH
2 DOGS BY THE RIVER.

     Next to this, on a smaller sign: BE CREATIVE with a pad of lined A4 and a tin of
sodden poster paints. Rain and a few coins in an upturned shell, beside offerings of
browning bananas and half-full bags of raisins.
     Whatever you have you must be ready to share, so the pilgrim splits his bread and
medical supplies with his companions, all along the way.
     But something’s unexplained. Who has walked this far, 1800km, to stop with 55 to go?
     Is it a test? Some drop a euro or fifty cents. Others pass and despise, disbelieve,
keeping their money for themselves. 
     I don’t have the courage or interest or sympathy to go and find the tents, the 2 dogs,
and ask. I am content to crouch by this tree, transcribing their sign in secret.
     Why do I watch and repeat, without responding?
     Because their sadhu’s wandering smells like pride, like pot, not lotus flowers?
     Because I am not like Christ, who gave anyway.       

*

  Arzúa 

I cross another soaked pilgrim in the pouring, pitch-black street.
     I’m going to have a pizza here, I say.
     We share an Xtra-Large between us. He’s Nicholas, blond, Danish, about thirty;
it’s like a blind date.
     Three weeks ago he quit his job at the software company. He’d get up at 06.00 and
start his emails, carry on at work and later do the same at home.
     He exceeds his targets, gets promotions; he’s competitive he says, successful.
Except he found there was no time left to enjoy life.
     He went on holiday to Bali and Thailand but never with a girlfriend: relationships
never worked out. And he had to admit that he liked his own bathroom.
     So I’ve got three days left to figure it out, he says.
     Maybe you need a hobby?
     Oh yes, I do already, I work out at the gym two or three times a week, he says.
 

39

     My teeth were breaking apart from my gums and coming out in handfuls and I had
to go for an emergency appointment with Mrs Anderton, the dentist I had when I was
a child. She had red hair and thin features, a gentle Scottish voice.

     I had the dream where your teeth fall out, I tell the others. That means you’re
anxious, Charlotte says, or a change is coming.

 to Pedrouzo 

     I meet Cara again in the woods. She’s solid and short with very white skin and long
dark hair scraped back from her face.
      She tells me she went to a girls’ school in Hertfordshire: her accent is middle-class,
cut-glass. As you would expect the other girls did History, Geography or Spanish at
St. Andrews, Bristol, Warwick and Newcastle and got their degrees and Cara says,
when I was fourteen I realised I wanted to be a plumber.
     Her chin and ears go pointy when she laughs. So I went and did this apprenticeship
but it turned out to be more focused on gas stuff.
     Now I’m a gas engineer for an agency but what I’d love to do is freelance. I think
some people where I live might prefer a lady plumber.

    She so much wants to arrive today, we are getting so near now the walk nearly
walks itself out, think of that, no more walking!
     The markers say 40k, then 37, then 32, then 27… I think I’m going to keep going
till I get there tonight, she says.
     You can’t walk 45k in one day, I tell her.
     But think of arriving, she says. The 0,00 sign. I’ll just collapse beside the cathedral.

 40

  to Santiago de
Compostela

I decide that walking alone
brings you closer to God.
Who are you in conversation with, then,
except with

         in the silvery aerial heights
         of the tall trees, in mist

         the curved wet leaves
         on the ground.  

  Tale of Two
Sister Trees

      I close my eyes and see the globe in outer space, green and brown masses suspended
in inky blue.
     Peer between cotton clouds and spiralling weather patterns, make out the Iberian
peninsula:
     peculiar line
     beetling across the top:

     peregrinos with their packs and roll-mats
     to the end of the known world
     and drop off into sea.

     Now we see from here (in space)
     America and Africa
     grinning from across shores:
     not the end at all.

     Still they score a groove in earth
     – as well towards Makkah, Kumana,
     Gangotri – and do not stop

    to sit in cities, hoarding
     but keep mobile
     and houseless,
     giving in to the river.

*

 Monte del Gozo

     The last part is concrete, next to the TV towers.
     At the hill if you climb to the right place
     you can just make out the cathedral:
     pencil-sketch, thumbnail.

                                     Gradually
     streets. Florists, fruit shops, bakeries
     then albergues. Arrows persist.
     Someone has dumped their entire rucksack
     by a recycling bin, to run for it.

    Now the roads funnel
     narrowly with chocolate shops and pastry smells,
     tourist shops and cafés with colourful
     painted signs, then
     bagpipes and on the left
     one of the doors – locked –

     through the arch, round the corner
     and into a space like the sky –
     a great square filled with rearing horses

     and collapsed pilgrims, looking up for something
     in the copper-green, bolted doors
     and bringing their long outside with them,
     the whole way in their bodies

     while around them this town, like any town
     circulates its business and nonchalance.

Phoebe Power is the author of Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), which received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was further shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her other publications include Sea Change (Guillemot, 2021), an illustrated pamphlet about the Durham Coast; and Harp Duet (2016). Book of Days will be published by Carcanet Press in April 2022.