Gautier Visited Spain

A hundred years ago? Really that long

Since you crossed into Spain, keen to record

Its quiet olive hillscape quickened by song

Of sun-bred people, then lulled by legend-stored

Cathedrals? That year, too, the flowers faded

As they fade today in the convent-yard.

While you watched, near Irun, the purling jade

Bidassoa hugging her velvet banks,

Hoping to be the theme of a serenade,

Your branching thoughts were rudely felled by the clanking

Of a heavy hammer. There! half hid

In reeds, a peasant, moody-eyed and lank,

Pounding bullets flat on sandstone-lead

From recent gunfire, picked up in the fields-

A hard harvest, smelling of the dead,

And planted by the alien slayers-yet yielding

A price at market! What else could he glean

From land that war had swiftly, blindly wheeled

Its engines over? Was he trying to clean

The soil of all that tore her breast apart?

Unhealed, he feared, she would not bear again,-

But soil's as sturdy as a Spaniard's heart!