Blood Oranges

In 1936, a child in Hitler's Germany, what did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero's face in the paper. No one told me about a poet for whose sake I might have learned Spanish bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I knew of Spain were those precious imported treats we splurged on for Christmas. I remember pulling the sections apart, lining them up, sucking each one slowly, so the red sweetness would last and last -- while I was reading a poem by a long-dead German poet in which the woods stood safe under the moon's milky eye and the white fog in the meadows aspired to become lighter than air.