Poetry – Issue 11 | January 2011
The White Village
by Daniel Aristi
The White Village
Province of Azurduy, Department of Chuquisaca, Bolivia
January 2000
Like a raised hand
emerging from amidst tungsten hills
the church’s bell tower
announces the white village;
it appears in the horizon
crushed between sky and stone
a Shangri-La of quicklime
and cornfields.
Midday approaches
and shadows await upright
grafted invisible onto the walls
and slowly melt
then decant down the street
in rising tide;
dammed behind a manger
time halts its flow
in old Spanish bronze
while twelve chimes softly
the bell falling silent
- exhausted -
before every knell sounded.
Minutes ticking accumulate
drip, and sift,
and time bursts free
and gurgles forward
through cobblestone streets
where a door opens
and a woman steps outside.
About the author
Born in Spain in 1971, Daniel moved overseas in 1997. He’s usually involved in do-goodery of different types in places such as the Balkans, Bolivia, Darfur, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Lesotho, etc. You can find his work at Black Cat Poems.
Read our current issue, Issue 11 | January 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
