by Vergil Essex

Created on: July 13, 2008

Write your ar
Andalucia, land of lucid light
Painters dream you
See in your rugged scapes
Al-Andaluz's moonwashed cities rising from the plains
guarded by keyhole studded fierce yellow walls
Bastions of that glorious heathen past

Dali's bonebleached deserts

Picasso's motherland.

In the hot velvet night
when sleep is hounded by heat
thick enough to cut
your bittersweet song
drifts from the hill like perfume on the breeze

Echoes of Moorish yesteryears float in flamencos' mournful wails
Mingle the mullah's call to prayer
with the sound of tragedy and love
Dark gypsies staccato heels chase rhythms of steel guitars

Brave bulls fight lusty men
whose flaming capes
mock and madden
Till - on their knees -
they take the final cut.
Bloodroses weep in the dust

Your duende seduces
Lovers of death
Drawn to your bloody history
riddled with bullets of freedom
Cold priests extortions
Inquisitors pitiless tools

Yet still you survive
The pains of broken brotherhood
soothed by the scent of or
ticle here

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