As promised, here's a suggestion from anytimefrances. It's a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, who's "now accepted as a national poet", says atf, "and has an airport named after him", which is good enough for me.
A friend of the Spanish surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, Lorca was a leading light of "la generacion del 27", and spent the 1920s in Madrid getting more successful and more depressed. Packed off to the US in 1929, he spent a year or so writing experimental poetry about alienation, published in 1930 as Poeta in Nueva York.
Atf has chosen a short poem from the third section of Poet in New York called "Murder" written on the poet's arrival in New York. She's sent in an (uncredited) English translation, perhaps hoping to avoid the whole issue of the work in translation. Maybe she wants us to concentrate on the work's singular urgency (all those exclamation marks!), breathless imagery and the knowledge that Lorca was himself murdered by the Falange in 1936 - the executioner is supposed to have said "I shot two bullets into his arse because he was a queer".
But I'm a sucker for all that stuff about poetry in translation, so here's "Asesinato" for you as well, just to get y'all going ("I'm done for" doesn't quite have the ring of "¡Ay, ay de mí!", does it?)..
Asesinato (Dos voces de madrugada en Riverside Drive)
¿Cómo fue?
Una grieta en la mejilla.
¡Eso es todo!
Una uña que aprieta el tallo.
Un alfiler que bucea
hasta encontrar las raicillas del grito.
Y el mar deja de moverse.
¿Cómo, cómo fue?
Así
¡Déjame! ¿De esa manera?
Sí.
El corazón salió solo.
¡Ay, ay de mí!
Murder (Two early morning voices on Riverside Drive)
How did it happen?
A cut on the cheek.
That's all!
A fingernail that pinches the stem.
A pin that dives in
until it finds the roots of a scream.
And the sea stops moving.
How, how did it happen?
Like this.
Stop it! Like that?
Yes.
The heart came out on its own.
Oh my!
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA