Barcelona--A Love Poem

Barcelona
Is a love song
Barcino
Barça

It is a hymn sung by the Mediterranean Sea breeze
Over the rounded hills and through the limbs of trees
Intertwined as lovers kissing

Barcelona is a lover’s kiss
A passion for life and beauty
A stroll down La Rambla
A long evening meal with old friends
A child’s laugh as water
From a mosaic iguana runs across her fingers

They say Sitges is romantic
And Tarragona is historic
But the Romans built the foundations
Of Barcino to last through the centuries
The weight of the city is carried on ancient stone
And today fills the land between mountain and sea

Out of that stone is borne a special people
Catalonian to be sure
Independent of mind and longing to be free
Of any flag but their own
But Barça is more than part of Catalunya
It is its own passion and spirit
Open arms for embracing
Many kisses for friends and family
And for the welcome stranger
Who is bade to feel at home

To Barcelona they come to be seduced
By warmth and passion and love
To bring dreams and dreamers
Who make dreams come true

Barcelona is a city that remembers
How it once treated its greatest dreamer
The man Antoni Gaudi who built dreams
In stone and concrete and mosaics
So large and so grand that it seemed impossible
They could be the work of one shabby old man
For so he had become
impoverished at the end
Living under the open arches of his dream
The stone poem La Sagrada Familia
Where his bones now lay while his dream rises still
And the world comes to marvel at his cathedral and all his works
Scattered like shining threads throughout the fabric
Of Barcelona

There is magic in this
Unexplainable
That every day in Barcelona
You will find couples kissing
In a park or by a bus stop
On a train or in a café

If this passion is fueled by wine or fine coffee
Or tobacco or chocolate is hard to determine
For all pleasures are entwined
With mild vices and temptations unresisted

It is its own song this boulevarded city
Lined with trees as well as dreams
Sun soaked beaches and dark mountain ridges
Where wild boars roam eating figs
Beneath the shade of Tibidabo

It is Barcelona
The love song of my heart
The lover’s kiss that never ends

Charles Griffin

For Jim and MaryLou, for Ariadna and little Anna,
And all my favorite places and people of Barça.
6 Sep2007 Paris/Grigny