Dawn

New York's dawn has

four columns of mud

and a hurricane of black doves

that splash in polluted waters.

New York's dawn whimpers

along immense stairways

seeking between ledges

blooms of inscribed anguish

Dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth

for there is no tomorrow nor hope possible there.

At times furious swarms of change

pierce and devour abandoned children.

The first to go out feel in their bones

that there will be neither paradise nor loves bare of leaves;

they know they go to the mud of numbers and laws,

to games without art, to toil without fruit.

The light is buried by chains and noise

in the shameless defiance of baseless science.

Through the neighborhoods there are crowds of swaying insomniacs

as if lately sprouted from a shipwreck of blood.

MICHELLE CLIFF'S novel Free Enterprise has recently been reissued by City Lights Books. Her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Gramsci's Ashes" appeared in the PN Review (UK), and will be published in NO: ajournai of the arts.

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA (1898-1936) is one of the most important Spanish poets of the twentieth century. His books of poetry include Romancero Citano (The Gypsy Ballads) (1928), El poema del Cantejondo (1932), Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter and Other Poems (1937), and Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York) (1940). He was murdered by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war; his books were burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco's Spain. To this day, no one knows where the body of Federico García Lorca rests.

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