Night of four moons
Through the pale and trembling shadows,
the hunger and the loss,
through the love songs on these dying pages
that Garcia Lorca left,
I see night’s ministers and ghosts
have come to take me back:
(Noche de cuatro lunas
y un solo árbol,
con una sola sombra
y un solo pájaro. )
I open my veins like a window,
like all who lived and got lost
between the midnight fires and the morning dust.
I rise like the mist, like an arrow;
raise my eyes to what is left.
Now all is dark and dying I must sing to you instead:
(Busco en mi carne las
huellas de tus labios.
El manantial besa al viento
sin tocarlo)
(The strophes between brackets come from Lorca’s poem: ‘Murio al amanecer/He died at dawn’)