TO LORCA

I’m told you passed a summer residence

for children, when they took you to your death.

It comes, I know, as little recompense,

but I’ve prayed for you and wondered, when breath

no longer held, if those who stood above

their still-warm guns could smell the olive grove.

I’d like to think they turned—a whisper?—dared

the shadows, the sky, looked to where you stared.

But you and I—far-fetched?—already were

in conversation across the years. No way

to silence that. In my room, on display,

are words that meet a harsher world with gestures

it reviles. I’d call them mine, if that could

cause the guards to take their eyes from where you stood.