Rills that darted tree to tree,
From high sierras to the sea,

Now run at random on the plain,
Their ruin wrought to entertain

The drunken soldiers of Castile,
Who came to fight and stayed to steal.

As lombards boom from battlements,
The fabric of an age is rent:

The flagrant crucifix is set
On fretted dome and minaret,

While in the alcazar there stands
The throne of crafty Ferdinand.

Too late, the fallen sultan sees
The cost of his inconstancy;

Too late, a fixity is forced
Upon his fugitive remorse.

Two leagues away, but still pursued
By strains of shawm and cornemuse,

He pauses on a rise to gaze
At symbols of his yesterdays:

Granada still beyond compare,
But now abandoned to despair;

The groves of palms that link this land
With visions of Levantine sands;

The broken fronds that once were spliced
With trailing vines of paradise.

La Cuesta de las Lagrimas, 1492



NOTE 1: Lombard: 15th-century cannon. Washington
Irving records in his Chronicle of the Conquest of
Granada that, "[while] the Moorish cavaliers gazed
with a silent agony of tenderness and grief, upon
that delicious abode, the scene of their loves and
pleasures...a light cloud of smoke burst forth from
the citadel; and presently a peal of artillery, faintly
heard, told that the city was taken possession of,
and the throne of the Moslem kings was lost forever".

NOTE 2: Shawm and cornemuse: 15th-century musical
instruments.



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