~ANNE WILSON~

TARANTO

---

      for Federico Garcia Lorca

Seven years before my birth,
Lorca was gunned down in Granada, 
his body thrown in an unmarked grave. 

If you walk by the river, where moonlight 
sobs in the willows,
and silver olive trees
set their finely-tuned leaves to trembling,
you can hear skeletons
stirring in the bosque, like violins
moaning under the weight of water.

Sometimes, among dark, twisted
branches, I feel his presence,
like light lancing the water's surface,
illuminating the rippled depths,
showing secret hieroglyphic stones.

Sometimes, in caverns of rock
where miners dredge deep in dark bowels
of the earth, without light or hope,
there is a reverberating echo . . . .

© by Anne Wilson