The Old Lizard
by Frederico Lorca
On the parched path, I have seen the good lizard (the drop of crocodile) meditating. In its green coat an abbot of the devil, his mood well-mannered and his collar stiff, he has the dull air of an old professor. Those faded eyes of a failed artist, how they watch the evening dismayed!
Is this your passage in the twilight, my friend? Use a cane, you are now very old, Mister Lizard, and those children in the village may give you quite a shock. What do you seek on the path, blind philosopher, if the wavering phantom of the withering evening has broken the horizon?
Do you seek the blue alms of the fading sky? A penny of a star? Or maybe you read the book of Lamartine, and you savor the plateresque trills of the birds?
(You gaze on the setting sun and your eyes glitter, oh, dragon of the frogs! with a human brilliance. Those gondolas without oars ideas, cross the gloomy sea of your burnt eyes.)
Perhaps you pursue the lovely lady lizard green as the wheatfields of May, like the long strands of the sleeping spring, that scorned you, and after, left you to your field? Oh, sweet idyll broken upon the cool sedge! But to live! what devilry! I have been simpathetic. The motto "I oppose the serpent" triumphs in the grand double chin of the Christian archbishop Already the sun is dissolving into the cup of the mountain, and the road is muddled the flocks It is the hour to march, leave the narrow path and do not continue meditating. From this place they will get to look at the stars when they eat you without haste those worms.
Go back to your home below the town of crickets! Good night, my friend Mr. Lizard!
Already the field is without people, the mountains dull and the road deserted; Only from time to time sings a cuckoo in the shade of the poplars.
