Blossoms
These days the plum
and pear trees in the yard blossom
and the magnolia flowers
for a few moments
before rain or wind
scatter petals to the ground,
like a poem the Japanese
have been writing
for a thousand years.
Today word arrives
another friend is gone.
The Road to Exile Barcelona / Collioure
As the fighting went on
the capital of the Republic
moved from Madrid to Valencia
to Barcelona. In those last months
Machado held weekly salons
in a house outside the city.
On Sunday, January 11, 1939
the harsh music of bombs
dropping from Italian planes
interrupted the singing inside the house.
Thirty bombers in the sky all day long.
He left Barcelona near midnight
and reached Cervia de Ter
exhausted, sleeping on a floor.
On January 27th in the rain, with friends
he boarded a military ambulance truck
and headed for the French border,
Machado insisted on being the last
to find a seat saying, ‘I have time, I have time’.
He arrived with only a rain-soaked suit
on his back in Collioure.
Numbed from the past sleepless nights
and the painful conditions of his travel
he was unable to utter a word.
Machado sat with his head lowered,
lost in deep reflection and sadness.
He spent most days in his room gazing
out the window and writing letters.
On one occasion we went for a long walk
down to the beach and he said,
‘let’s look at the sea’ and we sat down
on a boat resting in the sand.
The noon sun didn’t warm
and his body felt buried in
its shadow under his feet.
He took off his hat in the wind and
held it with one hand to his knee,
his other resting on his cane
absorbed in the constant
coming and going of waves.
‘If I could only live there behind
one of those windows freed at last from worry’
then he got up and walked laboriously
over the sand, his feet almost sinking in.
We returned in profound silence.
When they headed towards the border
most of their luggage had to be left behind.
We are still searching for that lost suitcase
of his writings from those last years
but it has disappeared in the rain.
Machado asked to be buried in Spanish earth
la tierra de Espana but his body couldn’t be
carried back to Spain without causing
the death of many—so people crossed
the border from France into Spain
and dug up and filled sacks with Spanish soil
which they packed around his coffin.
