Alicante Poem by John Mateer

Nobody believes me when I say this city
looks like Waikiki, the beaches curving away
under their wall of new hotels and
on the lone bare mountain, where a cryptic
Diamond Head should be, the Moorish hallucination
of a Roman castle. They should: not far
away Wild West towns await a cinematic eye
and south, across the azure Mediterranean,
my doppelgänger stands in a striped galabia,
feet planted on the earth of Djemaa el-Fna,
and, with fado in his heart, he recites
into the ear of an old Goytisolo,
a poem on the lost Caliphate
and on the World-to-Come.