Lisbon is sleeping Poem by Erin Mouré

Lisbon is sleeping;
the spaces under the staircase breathe like
a lung.
The loneliness inside horse-drawn vehicles
was transferred to us on their demise.
Rain falls into the Tejo.
Reverence waits in the streets
and on the roof tiles.

The city of Lisbon is asleep.
The Phoenician city is asleep and the Roman city is asleep
It is Sunday and the city of Lisbon
breathes like a lung
breathes like a lung
asleep on its side

a dog asleep on its side in a house in the Lapa
a chandelier on its side in the Bairro Alto.

Real lungs have journeyed to Lisbon
Lungs in a coat, arriving now
in Lisbon.
A carriage is not enough for a lung.
A river is enough for a lung!

A carriage has journeyed into Lisbon,
look, the lung has turned away
and is walking.

The lung wants a river or nothing.
The lung can make its own river and its own
coitas.

How haughty of the lung!

Some hands are slicing potatoes in the kitchen.
I am alone in the streets of Lisbon.
The cobbles are kicked up
fractured, the hands keep cutting potatoes.

The player falls dead on the field;
for a moment, pain's syncope, then nothing!
The hands in the kitchen cut potatoes.
Potatoes come from the earth!
Far earth. Earth below Lisbon.
Pain like that is surprising
but doesn't last.last long.

Sea.

The mouth of the sea?
A lungs' mouth too common in an aching world
So many ancestors wore their molecules differently
coats
meals, sweaters
as the wind comes up. Will you be there?

When you're hungry you move
so fast you bear snow in you.

50 years since it's

snowed in Lisbon.