Mercedes Sosa's purple crushed velvet voice entreating
a darkening Golgotha,
and the sky faded to a salt-encrusted fishing-boat blue...
carrying a burden of clouds as slow as old angels
returning to earth.

How can you say you are not real?
Are those tired and lumbering clouds,
overflowing with a sacred sea-froth light,
not real either?

Is the flat and empty blue of forever amen
behind the clouds not real?
Is it a painted back-drop on a pineboard pallet,
perhaps?

And Mercedes Sosa,
singing her 'Misa Criolla', sobbing her 'Kyrie'...
she is not here, in this room,
but is she not real?
I can hear the caustic tears, the spilled blood,
the sacrificial anguish
and the celestial spaciousness
in her pained dirge...
but is she real?

O, my dear, invisible friend,
you have been more real to me
in these weeks of terrible obsession
than the old timber table and chairs
I climbed on as an infant,
and that still remain, paintless, now,
and solid,
in the real rooms of my house.