John Bensko
October 2005

Garcia-Lorca and the One-Legged Schoolteacher


                                            No one sings here
                                                  no one cries in the corner

The luck of an old priest.
He wins a morning’s sleep
because he believes:

today no one will be executed.

He sleeps a mile away
from the hill
where they shoot people.

He hears only bells
against the wind
and dreams

of the fountain and the boy
herding goats at dawn.

To Fuente Grande and the olive grove,
to the fountain filled with goat bells.

In the roadhouse the poet and Gonzalez,
the one-legged schoolteacher, waste
their last minutes arguing
with guards who must kill them.

There will be no confessions.

Now the sleeping priest
dreams a trumpet
and shots in the distance.

Now three soldiers
as young and soft as angels
empty their pistols
in the soft necks of gourds.

The sun shifts along the hill
and lights up the gray shale.

The priest waking
believes the shots have come

because of the laughter and the beauty
of girls. He goes to the fountain
and hears from the boy he loves:

how he watched two girls bathe
under the shade of the olive trees;

how he heard flies and cried,
recognizing the one leg
of the dead schoolteacher .

The priest hears the goat bells
and dips his hand in the waters.
He thinks of the kindest words:

God forgives
those who die under olive trees.

What men notice, he thinks,
is you live with one leg
and your death spreads,

like the buzz of children
when one of them finds a dead rabbit
and brings it in a sack to school.

From Green Soldiers, copyright Yale University Press, 1981.