To Spain Poem by Olga Cabral

Jarama, Teruel, Guadalajara -
who does not remember?
Their sounds tap on the mind's window
toll memory wakes and the air is hollow with knocking -
the urgent hands of a hunted brother outside in the dark…
Badajoz, Manzanar, Santander -
who does not remember?
Who has forgotten holy Guernica?

Sun, and the blood of the brigades soaked your battlefields.
They came, the brigade brothers
and left their young bones on your ancient soil.
The brigades died, and the land died with them -
but you went down fighting.

My forefathers too were Iberian,
a people gentle and proud,
like your people dark-browed, dark-souled
speaking the same tongue.
In my bones I know your sun-scarred hills
wrinkled brown and dry like the face of an old woman;
there grows the scraggly olive, covered with a fine gray dust.
in my veins I know your untamed rivers
born amid steep and lifeless crags,
dancing a wild jota down to sunbaked plains
and sudden green groves of citron and of lemon.
And in my mind I know your vast uplands,
bleak and harsh as the fate of your people,
where never the song of a bird is heard -
it is too lonely there, too windswept, too naked of trees.
Old is your land, old
with the wine-grapes of Carthage and the silver olives of the traders from Tyre.
Often have I pondered the classic names of your cities:
Toledo, Zaragoza, Valladolid;
Granada, Cordoba, Castille.
O cities of Lorca, your nightingales are silent now, your bells are stopped with dust!
O cities of El Greco, you stand on a harsh and lonely plain,
Bathed in the green light of storm!

People of Lorca -
I remember how you were learning to read.
Between battles, with your bayonets,
you scrawled the letters of the alphabet in the dust.
As the war progressed, the day came when you could write your name entire,
and proudly you signed the post-card to the Ministry of Education:
Today for the first time in centuries, I Sancho Panza, soldier of the Republic,
was able to write my name.
Thank you, dear Republic,
for not keeping me ignorant.
But now it has all been taken from you,
They want you ignorant as animals,
Your work-twisted hands must know neither pen nor bayonet.

And they want you poor,
poor with the poverty of centuries.
A heavy cross of gold, laid on your backs, crushes you to your knees.
For the tearing cramps of hunger you are given incense no eat.
The droning of parish priests drowns out the vast groaning
from cell and dungeon-keep.
The Caudillo struts in his leather boots -
his paramours long since lie
under the Reichstag, in a criminal's grave in Italy;
yet, with mincing steps, he tramples on your dreams.
And still, while the parish priests drone orisons,
while leather jackboots click on cobbled streets,
and eye speaks to an eye;
a heart turns over its treasure on the deep and lonely night:

They say
El Caudillo knows -
there are men in the hills who have never surrendered!
They live there as the eagles do,
they bide their time as Boabdil…

Dear land
your children are scattered far:
from Perpignan
where welcoming arms of barbed wire awaited them
to far-flung continents.
But deep underground are the shoots of the dream,
In the high pinnacles of your hearts you have never surrendered,
And eagles soar there still in lonely flight.

Our is an age of exiles,
of lands bereft and hunted men.
Yet, from the high Pyrenees, as from the mountains of Macedonia,
the unconquered shall return.
The children of Perpignan shall have their land again.
Ibarruri - you shall embrace your beloved miners.
And from far continents, from lands of friendship and from hostile lands,
from all the island abattoirs
that dot the fair Aegean,
from all the barbed-wire hells -
salud, my brothers! We shall meet again!
We shall all come home!