poem “One Spring: Italy”, a poem about spending a brief amount of time in one country and seeing all of the differences you can before moving on, By Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers

[the Writing of Kuypers] [JanetKuypers.com] [Bio] [Poems] [Prose]

One Spring: Italy
Janet Kuypers
1/17/24
We walked through the remains of Pompeii
after Mount Vesuvius did it’s damage in 79 AD.
After crossing the Tyrrhenian sea
I actually hugged a column in Cicely
from Agrigento’s preserved Greek column ruins.
After circling the Colosseum in Rome
on those cobblestone roads through the Vatican City,
we had bad pizza in Napoli before making our
final stop to party in the watery town of Venice.
The buildings were colorful and the water was everywhere,
stairs went from the sidewalks to the sea,
and for the tourists there was a row of gondolas
waiting to take you on a water ride. But as I’ve said,
this is a tourist trap town, and everything has a price.
The only trinket I bought was a glass globe of grappa,
and really, that stuff tastes awful, and because
we didn’t know if we could take alcohol
over country lines, we bought a bottle of diet soda
to mask this grappa and chug it down
so they wouldn’t confiscate my glass globe.
Of course, no one searched us for contraband,
but we didn’t know better, and it was a good excuse
for drinking that grappa, because I kept that bottle,
and I still look at it, every day, and it makes me smile.

Copyright © Janet Kuypers.

my hand to an anim of jkchair