International Brigade Memorial Trust
IBMT supporter Liz Dickinson provides a poem on the anniversary of the death of Federico García Lorca. The renowned pro-Spanish Republican poet was murdered by fascists on 18-19 August 1936. His remains have never been found, along with 114,000 people who ‘disappeared’ under Franco’s regime. There are 2,000 known mass graves across Spain from the civil war. Only since the passing of the Historical Memory Law in 2007 has it been possible to begin the process of exhuming the bodies of Franco’s victims.
The language circumference of bones
Andalusian prayers thundered through the funnelled, fingered land.
Ten men, with hungry eyes dug the blessed Earth.
We need to know.
The Summer's drought heaved upon the village,
whilst the sky glared at these insurgents.
We want our writer back:
the Earth has had him long enough, sang the ten men.
The spades gently lifted his bones.
He's back home! He lives!
The Priest blessed his skull: a single bullet.
Those murdering bastards!
He was facing the sunrise, tracing the horizon with his index finger
when the death squad executed him.
The birds stopped singing that day
for how can you rejoice when the earth holds the bloody bones of socialism?
You took our mothers, bakers and preachers and we
almost suffocated from our grief.
Now our writer's back, his blood will indict
the winds of fascism with the death of words.
We all touched his poetic bones: I bit his index finger bone: my teeth cracked.
My tongue decreed: We all speak him now.
Published on 18 August 2020.
