The setting of this poem requires a word.
It's called "To a Little Girl, One Year Old,
in a Ruined Fortress."
And two other sort of footnotes to it, the word rocca
is the Italian word for fortress.
And Philipus here is Philip of Spain, Philip II of Spain
who built the fortress.
The scene is a great fortress, a medieval fortress,
or a late 16th century fortress over the Mediterranean,
blood soaked with history.
And in it, a little girl one-year-old
with golden hair and a smile of an angel
in the midst of all of the ruins and agony of history.
It's called "Sirocco."
It's part of a series about that spot.
To a place of ruined stone we brought you--
you being always the little girl in the poem--
we brought you, and sea-reaches.
Rocca, fortress, hawk-heel, lion-paw, clamped on a hill.
A hill, no.
On a sea cliff, and crag-cocked, the embrasures
commanding the beaches range easy,
with most fastidious mathematical skill.
Philipus me fecit-- he of Spain, the black-browed,
the anguished, for whom nothing prospered, though he loved God.
His arms, a great scutcheon of stone,
once over the drawbridge, have languished now long
in the moat under garbage.
At the moat-brink, rosemary with blue,
thistle with gold bloom nod.
Over the bay face, sun blaze and cloud tatter.
Now the sirocco, the dust swirl is swirled over the bay face,
mounts air like gold gauze whirled.
It traverses the blaze-blue of water.
We have brought you where geometry of a military rigor
survives its own ruined world, and sun regilds your hair,
in the midst of your laughter.
Rosemary, thistle, clutch stone.
Far hangs the island in blue air.
Far to that blueness the heart aches.
And on the exposed approaches, the last gold
of gorse blooms in the sirocco, shakes.