my secret garden

my last flat in Paris had a secret garden
it took me weeks to find the entrance
~it was via "l'ecole de rire"
then I could sit and watch
the strange and fanciful t'ai chi classes
with twirly hands, the garden birds and fish,
and see the crocodile of monks disappear
back through their secret door in the garden shed

Paris!

You're not Emma Bovary
so stop mourning your sojourn
in Paris like some lost
civilisation

you're an engineer
not a princess
pay your own way
you don't need "les frais"

A point of this career
is to be able
to afford to travel
when to want to

Anyway, your Paris was
always found around
a cafe table
with your friends

LMC

Refinding my Italian books

the tidy woman has no such joys as these.
Lost for months my Italian workbooks
five years of exercises, jokes and learning to
lap my tongue around that teasing language - lost!

now today when Brian unearths them
from the depths of a bureau drawer where
I had put them safe and then forgotten
it's like meeting an old lost friend again!

From "Franco ha un vestito blu" and
"Brutta stronza!", to "Non Sono Quà"
it maps as well a magic friendship,
born bizarrely in a storm.

Lessons at the Paris mosque,
in cafés, Tunisia, Sardinia and more
but more, a friend to really talk with
e che mi manca perchè non sono là