La Setmana Tràgica

 

With battle lines drawn between factory floor

and the ornate altars of Gothic faith

the anarchists crashed and burned in a week

on side streets and avenues, inciting

the Murcianos who, seeking work, brought

from the South their singsong vowels and grudges.

 

The ‘tragic week’ or a week of glory –

either way he’d watched, from his distant hill,

the unbraced columns of smoke collapsing

above a city whose past he’d sifted

for ways to shape the future: its churches

and abbeys, its patriarchal houses.

 

Their leaders imprisoned or shot – heroes

and martyrs, briefly – the cowed rioters

slouched back to habitual discontents,

allowing him to fight his cause again

with jobsworths and planners, the officious

clerks whose bylaws had always queered his pitch.

 

And of all the arts, his, relying most

on patrons, stalled when profits petered out

in a lost, rebellious Eldorado;

or stiff-necked, imperial blundering

came back home to roost: the textile barons

reeling, their real estate gone up in flames.

 

As gaunt as a tramp or desert father

neglecting appearances, a few green

leaves mixed with milk sustained him, as he traipsed

unrecognized, door to door, cajoling

the indigent to make an offering

for the great church none would see completed.