“This Garden Needs Hands That Are Not Hired”
Lorca, My Love
For Federico Garcia Lorca
Murdered by Fascists (1898-1936)
by Jack Fritscher
I am a flower
and my hand is my sun
that warms to life
the flower in me.
Lorca they say was
killed by Falangist bandits
with a shot up the ass for being queer.
He died
like I die
in a fertile country.
But I live again
after each petite death
of supreme forgetting:
the aloneness the dark root
of a scream.
I must make
the protein flower grow
to crush down inside me
the shriek that stands on tiptoe
waiting to remind me
that I am no one else.
I build my purl-veined harrow
of astonished flesh,
I cultivate the blood flower
of forgetting.
But my sun melts my harrow,
melts the paraffin flower
that blanches,
runs like liquid camellia,
dissolving to forgetting,
for getting the fore-gotten
sentence of aloneness.
And I wonder
what were Falangist bandits
and if they did any good
in the garden of bitter rosebay.
© 1967 Jack Fritscher