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Category: Writing and Poetry

And let everyone know that I'm not dead

This year marks that 85 years ago, Lorca, the greatest Spanish poet of all time, was killed. The civil war in Spain has just begun, and the fascists took him at his house, dragged him up the mountain and killed him.
They threw him in a mass grave. We still don't know where he is.

Lorca was young, and a kind soul, and gay. He wrote about his land and traditions, but, specially, he wrote about minorities. About people that suffered in silence, about people who weren't accepted as normal or were opressed and never really had the chance to be who they wanted to be. He wrote plays about the grief that was impossed in young girls when someone of their family died (La casa de Berarda Alba), he wrote about the pain of a girl whose only purpose on society was bearing children but was infertile (Yerma), he took all the classical forms and wrote about gypsies and how white society throws them into violence and pain (Romancero Gitano), he took all the avant-garde forms and wrote about poverty, and how modern society needs to leave people behind in order to grow (Poeta en Nueva York).

And also, he wrote about his death.

When the pure forms shank
in the cri-cri of daisies,
I knew that they had assasinated me.
They combed the cafes,
cemeteries and churches.
They pried open the casks and closets,
destroyed three skeletons
to tear out their gold teeth.
Still, they couldn't find me.


The title of this survey is another line of his (pero que todos sepan que no he muerto), also the title of a great documentary about Lorca's death, and the repression in Spain during the civil war and fascist regime. How there are still thousands of people buried in mass graves; and more specifically, about the LGBT community repression in Spain during that time.
The documentary is great. The title in English is "Bones of contention", and this is the trailer:
(activate automatic translation, works pretty well)


And in English, shorter:


I want to sleep for a while,
a moment, a minute, a century;
but let everyone know that I'm not dead;
that there is a barn of gold on my lips;
that I am a friend from the West wind;
that I am the inmense shadow of my tears.

Cover me up during dawn with a veil,
because it will throw me fistfuls of ants,
and soak with hard water my shoes
so the scorpion sting slides.

Because I want to sleep like the apples
so I can learn a cry that wipes me off of dirt;
because I want to live with that shadowed boy
that wanted to cut his heart out on the high seas.


3 Kudos

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