Merry-Go-Round
The holidays
go by on wheels.
The merry-go-round brings them
and takes them away.
Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.
The days leave their skins
behind, like snakes,
excepting alone,
the holidays.
These are the same as
of our old mothers’:
their afternoon long trains
of shimmering silk and sequins.
Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.
The merry-go-round turns,
hung from a star.
A tulip from the five
parts of the earth
On little horses
disguised as panthers
the children eat the moon
as if it were a cherry.
Rage, rage, Marco Polo!
On a wheel fantastic,
the children see horizons
unknown on all the earth.
Blue Corpus Christi.
White Christmas Eve.
by Frederico Garcia Lorca
from The Cricket Sings
New Direction Books, 1975