Lorca's Olive Tree Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Oh gilded earth,
How come you hide the bones
Of dead poets under amusement parks?
Even the masses have more anonymous names,
Though written in the calligraphies of paid for stone....
Is it because they have predicted their
Own deaths,
Like wounded birds too weak to migrate,
And so to dally in the wormless North;
Or is it because they have know that you too
Will fail one day beneath the asphalt
And the escaping sun?
They have meant you no harm,
Gentle womb of the virgin prostitute,
As far as I know them, they have dressed
Warmly in the sad blues of their alien depressions,
And written love poems for their professors and bartenders:
Neither the buyers or the sellers,
These egotistical arguments are beyond them,
Though the laymen continue singing like cocks crowing
The first murdered color,
Yet you allowed men from their own nation with riffles to find
Them, and destroy them with high velocity punctuations
Buried out somewhere in the Spanish hills
Near the olive tree where we still call their names....