Spanish Civil War Exhibition

Beneath the post-card sized lives,
‘Autor desconegut’.
Coarse shirts and pinafores camouflage
men and women by the rubble of the polling booth.

Untaught smiles for the camera,
faces, crumbling lines, walls etched with war,
pitchfork held aloft like a risen Christ.
A car crawling, fifteen packed inside,
dutiful ant, carrying dead aboard.

A leather hat brim spread across plains of sky
shields Catalonia from the sun lashing its back.
Montjuiic men chew blades of grass like Generals;
smoking cigars, strolling across grid squares,
dropping ash.

I plant training shoes among polished boots on the Metro train,
climb the stairs.
Like the victory of letters that breathe in the scent of locked drawers,
but won’t be kept there,
the blare of daylight towers over the Gothic quarter,
stalking billboards.