TWO POEMS FROM LORCA

 THE KING OF HARLEM

With a spoon he dug out the crocodile’s eyes

And beat the monkeys on their backsides using a spoon.

Eternal fire slept in the flint, and beetles drunk on anise

Forgot the mosses of the towns. An old man

Dressed in mushrooms approached the black men weeping

The Roses fled on the blade of the curving air,

On little mounds of saffron, children, flushed with a dark frenzy

Pummelled tiny squirrels.

To find a negro at ease

A bridge must be crossed so that the musk of his breath as pine strike the temple.

Kill the blond brandy seller and the camaraderie of apples on the sand

Batter the bubbling little jewesses who tremble under your hand

In order that Harlem’s King may come forth with his multitude

To sing, and crocodiles sleep in long files beneath. an asbestos moon

And that no one may doubt evermore of the dusters,

And the graters, and the shiny kitchen wares.

Ah, Harlem, Harlem, Harlem

There is no anguish like your red frustration,

The blood that boils within your dork eclipse,

The bright-as-jewels violence you shelter in the shadows

You a great King! dressed like an usher.

Ivory salamanders lay quiet in the open night.

The American girls bore children and money in their wombs.

The boys lay faint on the rack of a yawn.

Look at them.

These are they who sit by volcanoes and drink whisky

In a silver platter and devour little slivers of heart

In the mountains of the frozen bear.

That night the King of Harlem with a bitter spoon

Dug at the crocodile’s eyes

Battered the monkey’s asses, using a spoon.

Negroes wept confounded among the umbrellas

And the golden suns, Mulattoes, taut as rubber

Reached for whiteness and the wind blurred mirrors

And ruptured dancing veins.

Negroes, Niggers, Niggers, Negroes

In your sleepless night there is no release.

For the blood there is no shame, but the blood rages

Beneath the skin, live on the daggers edge

Beneath the claws and the witchbroom of the moon,

Marked by the sign of Cancer, blood

Travelling a thousand roads to find

The dead sprinkled like flour and tuberose ashes

The sky fixed in a death-like slant

And on its beaches

Colonies of planets rolling in abandonment.