Girl Reading Lorca at the Mirador San Nicolas
Granada, Lorca writes,
draws to its ancient walls and waters
those of a temper
melancholic, contemplative.
At the Mirador San Nicolas
the coral white of the tower
unbearably focuses the day’s high heat
on the brown body of a woman
who sits reading Lorca.
She is walled within the poet’s world,
alone with the breeze that comes
from the old hills of the Alhambra.
The Church of San Nicolas
is so clean, so white,
it surely casts no shadow.
It has summer’s uncomplication.
The girl reading Lorca ignores it.
She would spurn, I imagine,
this meditation on the simple,
hearing, more complexly,
all Granada singing at once:
rivers, voices, foliage, processions...
A gang of bikers comes to the Mirador,
all beergut and noise, with hair
as stiff and gunmetal as their Harleys.
They roister with backs to the Alhambra.
They do not see the bonfire of saffron, deep grey,
and blotting-paper pink of its walls.
None are reading Lorca.
The girl reading Lorca ignores the bikers.
How she does this is as mysterious as the town.
The heat and the glare and the blackjacket noise
batter my inner gates.
I seek the city’s hidden song,
its lilt on the wisps of the wind.
Granada is withdrawn, enclosed,
apt for rhythm and echo,
the marrow of music.
I want to peer over her shoulder
to read the poem she reads,
but that would be misconstrued.
Does she sleep the dream of the apple?
Is she a dark child,
wont to cut her heart on the high sea?
Does she read the great poet
into the walls and small surprising streets
of a city fit for dreams and daydreams,
a city with an atmosphere full
of difficult voices, an air so beautiful
it is almost thought?
The girl reading Lorca reads on
through the surging heat.
She ignores San Nicolas and the bikers -
and, it occurs to me now,
she also ignores the Alhambra.
The bikers straggle to their Harleys
in a fug of merriment; roar away.
The girl reads on.
We consult maps, strike
through the heat for Puerta Nueva,
for we must leave, but Granada remains.
Eternal in time, but fleeting
in these poor hands...
I look back.
In the day’s high heat
a girl is reading Lorca.
Other poems by Pete Hay
Sunset on the Irish Festival
Flower Cone
Echidna
The Duck's Guts
Interviews with Pete Hay
Conversations: an interview with Pete Hay and Richard Flanagan (1995)
A conversation with Pete and Anna Hay (2003)
Island to island: an interview with Pete Hay (2011)
OTHER WRITING BY PETE HAY
Reviews
BEACH, Eric: Weeping for Lost Babylon
DE PAOR, Louis: Goban Cre is Cloch/Sentences of Earth and Stone
Launch speeches
MATHISON, Robyn: To Be Eaten By Mice
ROBERTS, Bruce: In the Church of Latter Day Consumers
SANT, Andrew: The Islanders
Essays
Half-Time with Stout John
Port Arthur: Where Meanings Collide
What I did on my Holidays
Notes within Shadow