Since of your kind so few
This world affords, not now may we afford
Equably to lose or let by
You, the quarry and quarrel of so many
Qualities, with the hour in discord.
Do the vainglorious
Trail a glory after their vanity?
For, so you may have shown to us,
Horseman and soldier, the vicarious
Nature of pride in a well of humility.
How does the poem move?
Concerned with justice it presents judgement.
Impelled by love it says ‘I love’.
Thus, and by these presents, can never prove
Anything but its own allegiance.
How may its poet live
Under its public its private dominion
Addressed to energies
That, never fully nor truly disclosed to us,
Assert in language transcending assertion?
There are no answers,
No final answers-yours as good as any:
Swagger cloak and black Cordoba
Worn over a mention in dispatches
By the general Quiepo de Llana:
A mask. The mask becomes
As all who wear it warn, the man that wears it.
Yet, moulded behind it, beyond
Attribution, invisible, the expression
Language is given to elicit.
Lie where it was let drop,
Violence grinning on Portuguese ground!
Let me speak what below it beat-
First I name gentleness of the stopped heart
And its humility second.
Naming, I elegise
You, Sir, with coldness, whom I do love and loved;
And, being Africa’s,
Say the first lover of her European muse
Is by her Iberian peninsula buried.
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