Hazard along the spine,
stanzas running toward the brink,
the book’s menacing glued hinge,
a lethal pivot between pages 122 and 123,
and you, peripatetic period, wandering dot,
bug in the valley of the shadow of Lorca’s
ballads and laments and songs of death.
This is no country for miniscule insects,
crawling among words of love and death,
neither of which you know and therefore
cannot care, you, a coherent thrift of urges.
I blow softly to save you, sending the small
punctuation of your pinpoint corporeal self
scrambling from the dangers of the left toward
the line-ends at the right-hand margin of the page.
I repeat the old saw to your Lilliputian ears,
“In America they say poets are
too irrelevant to be dangerous.”
When you are half way marched across Lorca’s
Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard
I slam shut the book of collected poems.
The last thunder clap you heard was fatal,
your three dimensions reduced by one to two.
My bad, a brevity of blood on white paper.
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Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a brilliant Spanish poet and
playwright murdered by firing squad outside of Granada by the right-
wing Falangists who won the Spanish Civil War and put Francisco
Franco in place as the dictator until 1973. Lorca was a supporter of
the Second Spanish Republic and wrote poems and plays reflecting
his views on liberty. He wrote a poem critical of the Spanish national
police force, the Civil Guard. Lorca was from Andalusia in the south
of Spain. His writing reflects his love for that part of the country with
its gypsy ‘deep song’ and flamenco music and the influence of the
Moors who inhabited the region for six centuries. Summertime puts
me in a Lorca mood. I was sitting in our garden reading his poems.
The poem tells the story from there.