There’s a line in a poem by Lorca where he says he wants to get down on all fours and eat the grasses of the cemeteries. One night when I was a college student I went out with some friends by moonlight and we made our fugitive ways into the grave yard and together we crawled over the wet grass and with the help of some cheap wine we sampled that green hair growing out of the graves. We felt very poetic. It was cold and dark and the gibbous moon was behind the twisted branches of a cemetery elm and we were rather a solemn team as we put Lorca and Sir Walter Whitman to the test. The grass didn’t taste like much. Or to be precise it tasted like grass. There wasn’t a hint of spice or some other dhark humor belonging to the dead.
One of the things about being young is that one is seldom disappointed. We didn’t mind that the uncut grass growing out of those graves tasted like all the other grass that kids have always sampled since the dawn of time. We didn’t feel betrayed by Lorca. We sat together under the elm tree and sipped our wine and we smoked Marboros and we recited poetry and we were as fully alive as it was possible for us to be. As I recall the matter I think we even dimly understood that we had an obligation to the dead to recite poems. There was for us a little ecumenical jazzy naivete and it was a beautiful night.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 