For Goya Poem by Michael Wooff

For your visionary quality
Lovers of art have singled you out
And avoidance of frivolity.

Your palette was not that of a lout,
But capricious, disturbed and abrupt,
Laden with colours that sometimes shout

At us, gloomy visions that erupt
From craters vermillion, yellow,
Breached by treacle blackness, dark, corrupt.

And you could have been Virgil's fellow
Traveller being shown each circle
Down and down through Dante's inferno.

Into your great treasury hurtle
Matadors' suits of light, fresh-faced girls
With hair adorned by sprigs of myrtle.

Bloodied bulls round which a red cape swirls,
Peasants and aristocrats as well,
Tambourines, mantillas, golden curls.

You drew with one hand, casting some spell,
The silhouette of a wart-nosed witch,
Squatting in long shadows? Who can tell?

Just like her cat she wiggles her snitch
And the devil appears, an old goat
On two legs. She will never be rich.

Of your muse we still need to take note,
An angel, a spectre, Medusa,
And, now and then, she pushed out the boat.

As for your brush, who could refuse her?
Electrifying and symphonic,
Pushy too, ever the intruder,

Painting a king, the catatonic,
As if just ordinary people,
And Christs with tortured faces, chronic.

In this your chiaroscuro feature
Freaks of nature giving us bad dreams,
And every kind of sickly creature.

Sometimes we can see there garish scenes,
Red lips that seem to drip with honey,
Pink carnations, blood and bright-eyed fiends.

The eyes of men who kill for money
Burn flame-like in angelic visage.
Such countenances are not funny.

All bears the imprint of God's image
Even though in some the light of day
Merges into twilight, day's finish.

Goya shows us gunshots like the rays
The setting sun stains horizons with,
Ignoring arms that wave, hands that pray.

To his nightmares testimony give
Cartoons and drawings. In his sketches
Of a war's disasters demons live.

[Translated, by and large, from the Spanish of Ruben Dario (1867-1916) in 'A Goya' (1897) by Michael Wooff)