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An irony of History
”At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.” Lorca
Lorca’s blood wedding
menstrual blood
draining into lemon-tree-soil
nothing more than the toil, toil, toil
of peasant life in Al-Andalus.
Priests chant their rosary
like it was El Maleh Rachamim
or the Mourner’s Kaddish
(which it probably was, if the priest
was a converted Jew, a Converso, who changed his religion
to save his life or, maybe, the lives of his children).
The Muslim converts, Moriscos, prayed louder,
than did the Spanish-Goths. These converts never coughed,
but touched the head-covering they did not wear.
What they did on Fridays was only the business
Of the Inquisition.
Many Moriscos fled to Morocco, Lebanon.
To the centres of the Islamic world: Damascus, Baghdad.
But nearly 450 years after the final surrender on January 2, 1492
of the Emirate of Granada’s Muslim forces
to the Christian Castillian army of Ferdinand and Isabella,
Franco’s Moroccan units commit numerous…
