To Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico, socialist playwright, lyrical poet,
you pushed your lines beyond the limit,
words scrawled outside the page thin edge.
Men with leather boot heads
loathed your voluptuous world,
feared your fist punch plays,
were cut by your scalpel’s meticulous metaphors,
offended by the genital joy of your typewriter and pens,
black words orgasmic on white paper beds,
they took you out to shoot you on a moonless night
at Ainadamar, the Spring of Tears, between Viznar and Alfacar.
You spent your few years knocking down walls
between life and the cemetery,
between the church and the spirit,
walls erect between manly men and womanly women,
making women deaf to the whispers of men,
making men cringe before the hot iron of women,
making silver question its marriage to lead.
Haunted by lifelong dreams of death,
you wrote your ultimate play A Dream of Life,
your last blood the blotted ink,
your last breath the monologue.
Your final audience,
men with rifles who did not know
enough to know they did not know you,
your Spain deeper than their Spain,
your Spanish older than their Spanish,
your Iberian blood thicker in your veins.
Headlights from a truck separated you from darkness,
six bolts drawn and cocked, a penultimate ovation.
The final clap, a thunderous murderous applause.
Five bullets were hesitant to come toward you.
They did not want to make darkness or silence.
Three lingered in the barrels wasting time.
Two dropped leaden inches from your chest.
They were the lucky ones.
One, without a doubt,
headed for your heart.
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*Ainadamar (Arabic) Spring of Tears
*Viznar & Alfacar – two villages in Andalusia near Granada
*”A Dream of Life” – the play Garcia Lorca was working on when he was killed
“Ainadamar” is an opera by Osvaldo Golijov about the murder of Lorca by the Falange,
the right-wing Nationalists who initiated the dictatorship of General Francesco Franco.