Some Verse for the Depressed Rebel

^{for Lorca}

1
*
Fame is a B. You received its
fatal sting—Lorca: your house
is there, where it used to be.
They made a park around it
            in your name.

It’s some summer. El sol 
es el major torero: memory,
remains and ruins in your
name I hear.     Then birds
fill the sky like ashes in this
summer heat. Unbearable:
Yes. Just like the statues
they planted in your figure.

When poets become others’
ornaments … what do you think?
Is it possible to save you from
yourself now, or are you
            forever? 

The ports of your country, have
traded in gold and blood, and
much unwanted foreignness—
Or is it foreign-hood?—that is
Here. Did these Moorish states
of the mind … make you
who you are? You gave your
body, in unsatisfied desire, 
            to that faraway place
            where the ruins spoke
            to poets, and reminded
            you of who they are.

In your garden, a lemon tree
collects dust, as it should do—
Its fruit is dried up from heat.
This is the city of the farness
You nurtured like a seed. This
ornament of a city, Granada:
Another fruit? There might be
no names, familiar to you now.
Some things are better off 
unnamed? I can’t help but 
reason with your ash. Names 
become the first steppings 
            into ruin, yes?
Name a thing, and you’ve
marked it for the end, of
Imagination? And unless you
are willing to accept your
names misspelled back to
you, then don’t name a 
thing. Keep it floating in 
anonymous darkness, then 
            weave the bees,
            stitch them to their honey.
They won’t sting you that way, and out
of their buzzing, maybe a song
            will follow.    

2
*
Only so:           I keep yesterdays—
I fill my pockets with scraps
and scribbles.

As everything from yesterdays
beckons a reduction of every
            thing, to one crime:
            are we talking
            genocide now?

Who calls what and where?
Recollection is A. going mad
about how to reduce, and de-
duct, and add up, and fret
over the whole, that wants
to part with all other parts.

Listen now!
            Granada is your birth-
fact. We’ve established
the only place. No need
to name names again: I go 
looking for translations,
for edging the meanings
that exist beside sounds.
I believe they assassinate
that in your translation
to tongues that are stuck
in languages. You are a
rebel. Reduced to a poet.
A martyr, dressed up like
an Arab, and maybe trying
to fuck like one, but surely
trying to get fucked like one. 
I see: the flesh attracted you to
poetry. The forms made
fun of your facts, and
then a conclusion has
been drawn about your
            deaths:

He was a “man.” A.
martyr for what defiles
manhood. He wanted
to recreate the blade
and the rifle as the new
tools for poetry. He shot
in the dark often. No one
dropped dead. But he did
kill the echo. His slicing
of the wind destroyed
his vision. Perspective was
of no use to him. He slept.
He dreamt, and slept
some more and dreamt—
and he managed to receive,
at the same time, between
one moment of wakefulness
and the other, every injury 
that was dealt to him.

Copyright © 2024 by Ahmad Almallah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 18, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“The poem was written in Spain during December 2023, and before my first visit to Palestine since the beginning of the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. At that time, and maybe still, I find in Lorca a solitary voice, in the European context, which mirrors my own injuries amidst the violence.”
—Ahmad Almallah