For Garcia Lorca and Darwish. I don’t normally post things here I hope the publish someday because this might scuttle that, but it is Garcia Lorca’s birthday.
Do I hear echoes of Garcia Lorca in Darwish, or
did Lorca know the poetry of Moorish Granada?
There is a primordial order, transcendent
of languages, the form for casting poetry.
Oh to live in a country where your tour
of the honored poet’s home must wait upon
the privileged visit of a prominent matador!
Imagine Tom Brady, head bowed in a library.
Woe to live in exile, holding a void return ticket
to an alienated land where poets once honored
are hunted by a government that calls them by
an extinct biblical name announcing genocide.
Oh to live in a world where militant poets
hurl molotov verses, fiery belligerent language
that shatters against the border walls
illuminates and cauterizes the horrors.
Both poets lived the terror of their times.
Still they sang of love, of olives and oranges
cataloged the land that peopled their dreams,
found solace in an afternoon of fountains.
Is there not a place between Granada and Galilee,
a country for old men of wine and poetry
with fierce coffee in the shade of olives
and a tambourine moon over Gypsy hills?
Bury me in that warm country
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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