Goya

That god who stares from the picture-space
As if he - only now it's done,
The madness slaked - can recognize the face
Whose blood and brains he gulped, to be his son,
Catches the humanist's eye.

Chronus, blind time, knowing himself again
To be Kronos the wretched king,
Squirms like a frog across the void, his pain
Goya suggests in the stiff dance he's doing;
The darker shape of why

Is shadowed in the history of Spain.
The deed of sacrifice once done
Is such as never can be done again.
The naked body of the beloved son
In his sire's hand must die.

And many kingdoms of the past have died
Choked by the monuments they raised:
Eternity bought by infanticide,
An immortality of being praised.
The fierce Spanish sky

Towers like fate over exhausted fields;
The gold they wrestled from the sun
Wasted the factories and burnt the guilds.
All that the dark conquistadors had won
Time swiftly would deny.

The traveller, though, is not content at last.
There is an immortality
That looks, not to the future, but the past.

-Frederick Turner, "On Goya's 'Saturn'"