Hotel Paradiso (Poetry)

Stretched by the pool — prostrate on sterile tiles
as clinical as some mortician's slab —
the torpid rows of English tourists lie
unwrapped, absorbing heat — each cancered stab
of foreign sunlight willingly embraced
in idleness: the ten day bargain break.

The exile seeks the shadows, finds the glare
of cloudless sky too regular to take,
and yearns for contrast — grey, unsettled days
dissolving into dusk, that hint of frost
that wraps an English autumn, sharpens trees
to rural silhouettes, quiet sunsets lost

behind familiar hills as homelands rest.
This Eden is too vivid: colours boil
and dazzle with a sheen that quickly palls
to eyes that search for subtlety, recoil
from brochure blues and gaudy gold-tone sands.
Nostalgic dreams recall a colder tide

that tumbles wild and muddy — greenish-brown —
dragging noisy pebbles far and wide;
and bullied by the breeze along the shore,
tasting salt and England, bitter-sweet
with melancholy chilled by Channel waves
lapping round a seaside childhood's feet.

Bone-white, the hotel squats — its concrete skull
scorched by a sun grown hot as Dante's Hell;
horizons blur, diffused by streaming heat.
In air-conditioned Heaven, the fresh smell
of roses haunts the exile's sitting room
with visions of an English afternoon.