Deep Song (For Federico García Lorca)

Come flow oh salty tears of ancient Andalucia.
Let bells toll. Let winds sing. Let castanets rattle-tattle.
They mourn for you still sweet gypsy poet.
And it is an epic grief. Shouldered by all.
Carried like a trembling melody along rolling red roads.
Winding. Rising. Twisting. Turning. Harmonizing.
Spirals of weeping that echo from snow-capped peak to snow-capped peak.
Preserved in the clear air like the finest cured hams.
Your blood still stains the carbonated mountain waters.
Gives it that medicinal metallic aftertaste.
You are the jasmine, the foxglove, the lemon thyme.
The evergreen myrtle. The swales of swaying broomstraw.
You are the nightingale. The turtle dove. The swifts on the wing.
You are the ruined cortijo. The broken hammam.
You are the ristras of sweet Pimiento
hanging like bell-chimes from the balconies.
See the old lady in the doorway dressed in black? She weeps for you still.
See the herdsman on horseback? See the virgin tossed in crinoline?
They mourn for you Federico García; their long lost lover.
Their father, their mother, their neighbour, their dead child.
I wonder, did perhaps the smell
of the lemon blossom fill your nostrils
that dark August evening in 1936,
when the militia-men dragged you to that lonely hilltop
and there, beneath the branches of the olive tree grove,
forced that bullet squarely through the back of your skull?
Breaking open your carefully pomaded hair?
Staining your handsome v-neck sweater so?
Your body thrown into an unmarked grave,
along with the school teacher and the toreadors
and the one, two, three, four, five thousand more that followed.
Ay yayayay! A cold dagger to the heart would’ve been kinder.