July 20th -- Federico Garcia Lorca poem

Fuck Yeah! (Lorca trans. Bly)

New York


(office and attack)
to Fernando Vela

Beneath all the statistics
there is a drop of duck's blood.
Beneath all the columns
there is a drop of sailor's blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;
a river that goes singing
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of New York.
The mountains exist, I know that.
And the lenses ground for wisdom,
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on to the cobra's tongue.
Every day they kill in New York
ducks, four million,
pigs, five million,
cows, one million,
lambs, one million,
roosters, two million,
who turn the sky to small splinters.
You may as well sob filing a razor blade
or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,
as try to stop in the sawnlight
the endless trains carrying milk,
the endless trains carrying blood,
and the trains carrying roses in chains for those in the field of perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down,
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering
were the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
I attack all those persons who know nothing of the other half,
the half who cannot be saved,
who raise their cement mountains
in which the hearts of hte small
animals no one thinks of are beating,
and from which we will all fall
during the final holiday of the drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me,
as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity
like the children of the janitors
who carry delicate sticks
to the holes where the antennas
of the insects are rusting.
This is not hell, it is a street.
This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable
distances
in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,
and I hear the song of the worm
in the heart of so many girls.
Rust, rotting, trembling earth.
And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.
What shall I do, set my landscape in order?
Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,
who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.


--Federico Garcia Lorca
trans. Bly
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness pps. 110-112

May my invective poetry/writing be as fantastic, may it be so.