Laurie Lee and Lorca

Last night in Granada, Alice shouted out:

'Dad, we're going somewhere where Laurie Lee went!'

So today, high up near Orgiva's Alpujarras crossroads,

In the thunderous heat haze of the Sierra Nevada,

Far from Granada's streams and rivulets

(Lorca: 'a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain'),

With dry as dust river beds and hard as rock

Sunburn crags for company,

We sat beneath the lemon trees,

Olive, palm and bamboo screens

To shelter us from an unremitting sun blaze,

Thinking of Almunecar, to where Lee first walked out,

Roaming through a country on the edge of civil war,

He, sans hat, sans water, sans language,

With just a violin to chatter and converse;

How far-fetched Stroud's green wooded spring lines

Must have been to a sun sick traveller,

Trudging through the arid, high heat of Great Depression Spain -

Cider, Rosie, Slad, Sheepscombe and Stroud,

A half-remembered dream, 

Drifting through the swirling smoke of the pistols

Of Lorca's fascist assassins.