"As I have not worried to be born,

I do not worry to die." Frederico Garcia Lorca.

What remains in the purple garden of home?

Tattered garments, frayed memories,

resurrected in all honesty.

Now your hands are around your lover’s waist,

eyes shining with tears,

tasting the brandy

swilling around your mouth

looking out at the azure ocean.

 

So far from Barcelona and the battle for Madrid

you wrote about the pacific ocean

so far from Moorish poems of loss and dereliction

Al-andalus, those marble perfections of pink and gold.

You always thought

fascists merely kill.

And as nothing can kill the words of the heart.  I remembered

Nothing should kill our fight,

to light the flames of resistance,

the struggle to understand the many languages of the heart

as anthropologists rip our bones apart, looking for the tincture

of the very heart of that man who killed you.