dream, ferment, and dream

Beautiful illustration by design Studio K. The text is from Oda a Walt Whitman by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, which he wrote in 1930 while completing a year of study at Columbia University. The poem was not published in its entirety until 1940, more than three years after the poet was executed by Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist troops during the Spanish Civil War.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.
Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.