Quito
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
The volcanoes hem us in.
I’m a fraud here, with my money
and my struggling spanish:
I want to say I’m sorry,
though I’ve done no harm
that I’m aware of. Do the others
feel this way? The historic centre,
we are told, is the best preserved in
Latin America. Nothing of importance
has been lost. Later, crossing the cobbles
fronting the church of San Francisco,
sick with altitude, I can smell gold
roasting the old stone of the nave.
Slave-built palace of a new sun god.
The sun goes down at six precisely.
And I’ve lost myself somewhere
Katherine Ebury
Katherine Ebury lives in York and is an English student at York University (so she currently spends more time thinking about other people’s poetry than her own). Next year she’s planning a gap year for travelling/thinking/writing in order to remedy this. She has been writing seriously for about two years: her poetry has mainly been published in The Zahir, a University literary magazine, and some other regional publications. She also writes criticism when she has the time.