gardens swooned under the scent of jessamine and nard. You were the slim-waisted Lady of Doves, you were Ishtar and Ashtaroth, for whom the Canaanite girls gave up their earrings and anklets and their own slender bodies, you were the dolorous Isis, and Aphrodite. It was you who on the Syrian shore mourned the brown limbs of the boy Adonis. You were the queen of the crescent moon, the Lady of Ephesus, giver of riches, for whom the great temple reeked with burning and spices. And now in the late bitter years, your head is bowed with bitterness; across your knees lies the lank body of the Crucified.

Rockets shriek and roar and burst against the velvet sky; the wind flutters the candle-flames above the long white slanting candles.

Swaying above the upturned faces to the strong throb of drums, borne in triumph on the necks of men, crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe of vast dark folds glittering with gold haltingly, through the pulsing streets, advances Mary, Virgin of Pain.

 Granada

VI TO R. J.

 It would be fun, you said, sitting two years ago at this same table, at this same white marble café table, if people only knew what fun it would be to laugh the hatred out of soldiers' eyes ...

  —If I drink beer with my enemy, you said, and put your lips to the long glass, and give him what he wants, if he wants it so hard that he would kill me for it, I rather think he'd give it back to me—       You laughed, and stretched your long legs out across the floor.

 I wonder in what mood you died, out there in that great muddy butcher-shop,       on that meaningless dicing-table of death.

  Did you laugh aloud at the futility, and drink death down in a long draught, as you drank your beer two years ago at this same white marble café table? Or had the darkness drowned you?

 Café Oro del Rhin Plaza de Santa Ana

VII

Down the road against the blue haze that hangs before the great ribbed forms of the mountains people come home from the fields; they pass a moment in relief against the amber frieze 

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