It’s always a good idea yo allow oneself the luxury of a quiet night to get one’s bearings. Serendipity has led me to this charming Euro style 1920’s hotel in Buenos Aires that was the temporary Argentine home of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. His room, 704, is a museum now.
Lorca is somebody I found on my own, neither having been required to read him in college nor desiring to. I like Lorca. He liked Gypsies and stargazing and romance and the moon and was such a gentle gentle man and such an inconceivable threat to the Spanish government’s machismo that the Franco regime murdered him in a dark country field after making him dig his own grave.
It’s said his ghost still visits the seventh floor.
This night, he is certainly visiting me. Tonight as I write this in South America under a gypsy moon, fueled by insomnia and homesickness, Lorca urgently keeps reminding me of someone I can’t get out of my mind--
Sleepwalker’s Romance
by Federico García Lorca
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon.
