Romancero Gitano by Federico García Lorca (1928)

_Verde que te quiero verde._ Green, how I want you green. The refrain pulses through these ballads like a fever, felt long before it can be explained, the way a half-remembered song can ache. Federico García Lorca took the romance, the oldest popular verse form in Spain, and filled it with a world where the wind has desire and the olive trees grieve, and the moon comes down into an Andalusian forge to carry off a Gypsy child. The moon is no metaphor here; she is a character, cold and certain, and the Guardia Civil move through the same night as impersonally lethal as she is. Knife, blood, and horse recur as motifs in a piece of deep song, and the Gypsies at the heart of the book are already myth before their blood touches the ground. Lorca was shot by a firing squad eight years after these poems made him Spain's most beloved voice. Read them now, and they seem to have known all along.