It was a rainy morning in the old city.
He looked out the window and saw dark clouds rolling in from the sea.
He felt the cool breeze across his naked body.
He turned quietly and watched her sleeping.
The sheet rose and fell with each of her breaths.
He was thankful she was finally resting.
“Is she dreaming of time, or place, or the sea, or me?” he wondered.
Yesterday, they thought they’d never see the light of a new day.
There was a cut across her cheek and a rip in her jeans as they had struggled hand in hand across the countryside.
They had arrived at the hotel in the night.
He had taken off her tattered clothes and had washed the blood, sweat, tears and dust from her body.
She had done the same for him.
He had remembered the look of fearlessness and hopefulness in her eyes as they had journeyed over the land together.
That memory comforted him now as she slept.
He laid down beside her.
The curves of her body reminded him of the gently rolling hills below the mountains where he lived as a boy.
She was beautiful like that land, like the yellow flowers he found as he roamed the countryside, like the soil he walked over barefooted as his grandfather turned the earth with donkey and plow, like the leaves of the trees that sparkled green after the rains of the rainy season.
He moved close to her until he felt her breath across his neck and her heartbeat upon his chest.
He closed his eyes.
She sighed and began to stir.
Tomás,” she whispered as she opened her eyes.
“Mi mariposa hermosa,” he answered.
“Estoy aqui, estoy aqui.”
Though their bodies had been broken by the revolution, they made love to each other like the rain that fell softly and tenderly out the window on the city of Havana.
- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown-eyed girl, 2022
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