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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca is possibly the most important Spanish poet and dramatist of...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about New York
A Man Meets a Woman in the Street
by Randall Jarrell
Cityscape 1
by Pablo Medina
In the Village
by Derek Walcott
Meditations in an Emergency
by Frank O'Hara
New York Notes
by Harvey Shapiro
Nothing Stays Put
by Amy Clampitt
Old Coat
by Liam Rector
Public Transportation
by Elaine Sexton
Summer Night, Riverside
by Sara Teasdale
The Lower East Side of Manhattan
by Victor Hernández Cruz
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
The Tropics of New York
by Claude McKay
To Brooklyn Bridge
by Hart Crane
Spring
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
A Blessing
by James Wright
Alcove
by John Ashbery
Another Attempt at Rescue
by M. L. Smoker
Birds Again
by Jim Harrison
Black Petal
by Li-Young Lee
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
Chansons Innocentes: I
by E. E. Cummings
Diary [Surface]
by Rachel Zucker
Each year
by Dora Malech
Equinox
by Joy Harjo
From you have I been absent in the spring... (Sonnet 98)
by William Shakespeare
If a Wilderness
by Carl Phillips
In cold spring air
by Reginald Gibbons
In the Memphis Airport
by Timothy Steele
Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth
Morning News
by Marilyn Hacker
National Poetry Month
by Elaine Equi
Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
by William Morris
Song On May Morning
by John Milton
Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]
by William Carlos Williams
Spring Day [Bath]
by Amy Lowell
Spring in New Hampshire
by Claude McKay
Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
spring love noise and all [excerpt]
by David Antin
Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze
Springing
by Marie Ponsot
The Enkindled Spring
by D. H. Lawrence
[O were my love yon Lilac fair]
by Robert Burns
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City That Does Not Sleep  
by Federico García Lorca
translated by Robert Bly

In the sky there is nobody asleep.  Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the 
            street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
            stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth.  Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream.  Careful!  Careful!  Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
            dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists.  Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day 
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
            eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful!  Be careful!  Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention 
            of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
            are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky.  Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world.  No one, no one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
            night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.



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By Federico García Lorca, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Selected Poems: Lorca and Jiménez. © 1973 by Robert Bly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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