The moon was an olive of silver and green,
When the boy of Fuente Vaqueros was seen.
He carried the music of rivers and clay,
And a theatrical magic that turned night to day.
He was Federico, the prince of the song,
Whose heart was a guitar where passions belong.

He ran with the gypsies, he captured their cry,
The deep cante jondo that cuts through the sky.
His verses were painted in jasmine and blood,
A lyrical river, an emotional flood.
“Green, how I want you green,” was his chant,
A color of longing no system could grant.

He traveled to Harlem, he walked through the crowd,
And sang of the lonely, the black, and the proud.
With Dali and Buñuel he challenged the old,
In surrealist dreams where the secrets were told.
He was laughter and weeping, a theatrical flame,
Who gave to the sorrow a beautiful name.

× × ×

But behind the bright canvas of music and play,
Was a dangerous passion that walked the wrong way.
His Sonnets of Dark Love were hidden from view,
The forbidden desires that everyone knew.
He loved with a fury that bordered on fright,
In a country of iron, of shadow, and night.

Then the civil war erupted, a furnace of hate,
And the fascists of Franco marched into the gate.
They hated his genius, his free-thinking art,
And the unnatural passions that lived in his heart.
They hunted the poet through Granada’s old street,
While the drums of the tragedy ruthlessly beat.

He refused to take flight, with his visor wide thrown,
For he thought that his city would shelter its own.
But they dragged him away to the olive-tree hill,
Where the air of the morning was heavy and chill.
By the spring of Alfacar, they ordered the slate,
And the voice of the republic surrendered to fate.

× × ×

They shot him in darkness, they left him un-found,
In a grave without name in the Andalusian ground.
They killed the frail vessel, they silenced the man,
But they couldn’t undo where the poetry began.
The wind through the olives still carries his cry—
The immortal Lorca, the voice of the sky.