Homage to Miguel Hernandez

                    y ahi te quedas, al mundo le diria / and you stay here, I say to the world

For so much suffering from love
Of your wife's sweet olive breasts
And the halo of salty air
Around the head of your son
Whom you never saw,
You retched in your cell seven years
And groped along the shit-littered floor
For the lost pulse of Spain,
And when your last fit of coughing began,
Spitting out the scraps of your lungs,
You sent down to us, in your death,
Your poems smuggled between bars
And out under the noses of the Civil Guard,
Into hands that did not want to go on.

                    --Floyce Alexander

                    (first published in The Nation,
                    collected in Bottom Falling Out of the Dream, Lynx House Press, 1976)