Looking For Lorca

The late October sun is setting,

it has been a tiresome day, just outside the town.

The Alcalde came, but didn’t stay long:

a meeting with the manager of the local bank,

"vital business" for the tourist board.

The shovels and picks savaged the old ground.

The old man’s toothless grin was as senseless

as all the digging over of history.

We came for bones. Poet’s bones

by a mountain road between Viznar and Alcafar.

On the mountain side a ruin

looks down on our futile scrabble.

The ghost of Bernardo Alba peers through

a pane-less window and whistles gypsy ballads

while the old man purses slack lips,

‘It was here they did it. I know.’

But there are no bones, no last remnant

of a poet or a maricon or the others,

just an old man who cannot even remember

the difference between we and they.