POEM
28
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 the 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 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 make 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
Jane Miller, “28” from A Palace of Pearls. Copyright © 2005 by Jane Miller. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
Poet Jane Miller was born in New York. Influenced by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, . . . MORE »
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