The Txapela

Today I awake to sunlight

filtering through an attic window

from a Basque sky

and don a summer dress

though it is late Autumn

and cross a cobbled street

to a cafe bar

where I order black tea

and cross  my fingers

that it will not be Earl Grey

and will come with milk aparte 

and hopefully cold

and that the mermelada will

be derived from oranges

and that the man wearing 

the black beret

its rim pulled forward

finger thinned to a peak

a txapela in Basque

pronounced chapela

will grace this terrace

with gravitas

to sip his cafe solo

and to remind me 

of the sanctity

of old ways

and send me scuttling

homeward

to retrieve my few

focal as Gaelic

before those "thirty-one 

words for seaweed

whiten on the foreshore"

Copyright 2022 Cathy leonard All rights reserved

See Aidan Mathews poem The Death Of Irish