George Drew: Federico García Lorca, You Have Ruined My Day

Federico Garcia Lorca, you have ruined my day. Oh, shame!
Shame on you! It started out fine, this magnificent March day.
The sun was shining and the birds were singing. I was easing my way
through the morning in Saratoga Springs, my plastic bag of books swinging
as I walked, swinging merrily by my side like the chain of a fobbed watch
that has mastered time, speeding it up or slowing it down at its whim:
.
tick, tock; tick, tock. A day too close to dream for a worldly poet like myself.
Then, Lorca, time turned in on itself and everything changed.
.
I was browsing the Poetry Section in B & N, when on a lower shelf I saw
a photograph of you on the spine of a Collected Poems and a shudder
went through me so scary it could have been the tremor and all its aftershocks
rolled into one of a 9.5 magnitude quake. The photograph was in black & white,
one taken not too long before your end, and my beginning ended,
its wormhole entry cemented; and there I was, besieged by uncertainty,
at the mercy of time, a clock rocketing willy nilly. I might as well have been
installed in the Science Section, bookended by Einstein and Heisenberg;
.
and this, in the end, might as well have been a poem about savage reckonings.
Oh, it’s all your fault, Federico García Lorca. You have ruined my day.

Copyright 2023 George Drew

George Drew’s many books include Just Like Oz: Essays on a Few Poet Wizards & Their Multifaceted Magic (Madville, 2022).