Franco's Pigeons

Taffy Thomas the famed storyteller tole me once that a story always carries with it a burden - the story must be passed on.

The poem here, from my last book of verse, The Lonely Zoroastrian is a true story gifted me by a Spanish friend, Luis. His father, a Socialist, hid for many years in the attic of their house because Franco would have had him killed along with the other thousands he had murdered. Franco is long dead now, as are many of those who fought against the fascists, but his supporters are still there. Another Spanish friend, Miguel Manrique told me how, during a more recent attempted coup in Northern Spain, a priest set about making a list of people in his parish who, had the neo-fascists won, were “to be dealt with.”

Apologies for the doub;e spacing

Franco’s Pigeons

Your father lived for thirty years under the roof,

Lived on nothing but the unwashed Truth, raw.

Thirty years eating the Truth, drinking the Truth

In quiet sips in case the pigeons heard and saw

And told on him, this man that wasn’t there.

In a cock loft without windows, without doors;

An old crate for his books, one bed, one chair,

A bucket for a toilet and a hatch in the dusty floor.

Whispers of light come sidling through the cracks,

And small slits where the mortar has long gone

Between the tiles. A soft light knocks each dawn,

To tell him that there is a world beyond the slates;

A world of murder and of hate, but a world,

He hopes, of kindness and of brotherhood also.

It is a world the pigeons visit every day

Walking, chest out, beneath the café chairs,

No cares, as free as any general to strut and peck and coo.

Bars of light are made solid by the dust,

As solid as the sounds, the cries and

Little noises from the street that come on wings

To wend through spangled motes and specks

To tell him Time is waltzing by.

On holy days –

Bands and processions, market days the carts

Cackling their way to the great square

Where ancient walls are pocked with bullet holes

And stained with his compañeros blood.

His daughter plays a skipping game with friends,

His son pedals his bike and kicks a ball;

He feels the sounds of their unspoken love

Rise softly up the warm house wall

Each pulse of ball and stone touching his soul.

The voices of small children rise like smoke,

Numinous, pure, lifting him back to the days

Of his own innocence. They buy a small

Transistor radio and an earpiece and he drinks

In the World Service through the years.

Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, men on the moon.

He looks, the night he hears that news,

Through a slate he’s moved, and sees the moon

Sailing by islands of cloud, and aches to be that man

With his helmet, flag and pressurised suit,

Free to walk the whole wide moon in his ironical boots.

For thirty years nothing above his head but slate

And pigeon shit and the truth-telling stars.

The Sun, the clouds are not his sky;

His clouds are softly sleeping pigeons and his sky

Is roof tiles, mortar-snots and pigeon shit.

They bring in food each day, slide it across the floor

With a half of wine, a newspaper or book,

Silently, from the ladder and the hatch;

Praying to all the saints and the Virgin Mary that

Certain neighbours would not see that four

People are eating food enough for five.

For more than thirty years his children walk

A narrow ridge of silence, know the noises right above

Their bedroom are the little sounds of love.

They know all through their growing years,

Their father lives amongst the flapping birds,

Becomes for all the world another cooing pigeon, caught

Beneath the roof, above the streets where he once fought.

Your father is a pigeon without flight

Who can not even walk the streets at night

A shadow in the shadows where light dies,

In case the moon should shrivel him like the sun

Does to vampires, and the Truth to lies.

He has them all encoded, safely numbered;

In a child’s school exercise book

The names of the dead bear witness and are saved

For the day the sun will come to shine again

On those unmarked mountain graves.

This is the freedom that your rulers bring,

This is the freedom that your bankers bring,

This is the freedom that your bishops bring,

This is the freedom that your generals bring.

Your father lives with the pigeons

And the spiders in the roof – for knowing the truth.

Perhaps, you think, your father is a pigeon?

The great tarantula, El Don Franco,

The Generalisimo, would say that that was so.

But when your father came at last into the light,

What then? Did he, a Rip Van Winkle, walk

Carefully, blinking, hands touching walls

And children’s heads and compañeros’ hands?

And did he still remember how to talk?

To walk without fear of the badged cap and the gun?

Now, with Franco dead, he had no need to hide.

What then? I only asked you once, Luis, and you just cried.