Here's Lorca, the poet, with his brother
when they were both children in Southern Spain being told
a story by their Moorish housekeeper called,
"A Palace of Pearls."
Later in the poem, he's all grown up.
"Dressed as a Moor in curtain and towel and plastered in rice
powder, a servant gravely recites a semi-invented tale,
'The Palace of Pearls,' of which little is recorded but much
might be imagined for the delectation of two enthralled
brothers with black shiny hair and white starched blouses
as white as funereal roses and black eyes as black
as a sleeveless summer dress of mourning,
for an endless hour in an Andalusian garden before these
well-off kids are called to eat lemony squid and forced to nap
from the heat such that years shall pass thus before they
awaken to a day their Granada is surrounded by nationalist
soldiers who are sneering at them,
saying that those who don't wear uniforms should wear skirts.
I imagine at night more bullshit with their short cigars while
they search house to house, accusing our one slight man
of contacting Russia and hiding the radio in his piano,
a vile invention of armed civil authority who murder Federico
García Lorca on native soil.
To this day, no one is saying exactly where, exactly by which
olive trees.
Does he fall like a puppet?
Do the Guard piss afterward on the shallow grave?
There comes a reckoning that it might be a failure to theorize.
And anyway, what's art all about if it merely
lengthens the shadows that makes the cowards evil and the poet
immortal?
Nevertheless, even the lowliest poet
would rather go home to a meal of fireplace embers
than not go down that deserted road of red Earth
and imagine the bloody worst because necessity
dictates one must be careful of murderers
in a palace of pearls."