ANNE WHITEHOUSE

Poet in New York

In memoriam, Federico García Lorca

The long June evenings hide secrets--
new life shadowed by green leaves,
messy and wet, delicate and fragile.

On my way to a concert in the falling dusk,
I pass doormen standing one by one
in the entrances along Seventy-Eighth Street
singing love songs in Spanish and Italian.
Like awnings that shelter the singers,
the rain makes spaces for their melodies.

I am thinking of Lorca on his birthday,
spiritual descendent of gypsies and troubadours,
and how he came to New York
fleeing the wreckage of love
and friends who called his art old-fashioned.
The city was the remedy he let explode
within him in all its mysterious force,
its hurts were wounds to lead him to creation.

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