After Watching Carlos Saura’s Film of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”

Your wife had left you post-diagnosis

yet here you were this night stumbling on fire

with dance and blood,

a retired high school Spanish teacher,

now learning the new syntax

of multiple sclerosis.

It burned from your hands and feet,

the castanets, the dark mole

on the flamenco dancer’s cheek,

All the broken stomping, clapping,

duende of dark.

We stumbled into the lighted lobby

where you grabbed my friend and me,

said we must all go now,

tonight, for roja, for wine,

for the dance and the darkness.

But we sad women demurred

to the rain in our hearts,

afraid of the blood call.

We scurried like mice into hoods, coats,

another night we promised.

But it would not come again.

I knew then that I had

been called, chosen,

and all these years have remembered only

what it was like not to go.

Note from the poet: I hope wherever Lew is, he will remember
that night and accept my regretful apology. Lorca writes: “duende is a power
and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept.” These are the moments
we live for.

For more poetry, see mnartists’ “What Light.”