That hot desert beach in Ecuador, with scarcely a splotch of vegetation fronting as it does a Pacific so immensely lush it hurls lobsters on great flat boulders where children brave fatal waves to pick them up. Turning from one to the other quickly, it is incomprehensible: from wild, gray sunblasted burro eating cactus to azure immensity of ocean, from miniature goat dead on infantile feet in sand to imponderable roar of swells, equatorial sun; music that squeezes the blood out of the heart by midnight, and girls whose legs glisten with sweat, their teeth white as Canadian snow, legs pounding as plump brown pistons, and night noises I've never heard, though at the coolest period in these latitudes, near the faintest beginning of dawn, there was the cold unmistakable machine gun, the harshest chatter death can make. Only then do I think of my very distant relative, Lorca, that precocious skeleton, as he crumpled earthward against brown pine needles; and the sky, vaster than the Pacific, whirled overhead, a sky without birds or clouds, @3azul te quiero azul@1. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SIGNATURE OF LOVE by KAREN SWENSON PHANTOM by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE THE AMERICAN FOREST GIRL by FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS THE LONG WHITE SEAM by JEAN INGELOW ODE TO MASTER ANTHONY STAFFORD [TO HASTEN HIM INTO COUNTRY] by THOMAS RANDOLPH TO R.K. by JAMES KENNETH STEPHEN |