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December 1936, Spain
By Clive Branson
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You! English working men!
Can’t you hear the barrage creeping
that levels the Pyrenees?
Is time intangible
that bears so audible
and visible a thing?
Can’t you hear the children and women cry
where the Fascist bomb
makes the people’s home
a tomb for you and me?
Can’t you see the gashes in the street
where our people stumble
when the city trembles?
Can’t you smell the rose held in the teeth
tighter than death?
They who lie so still
with no Cross,
only this, their courage, their faith
manures the barren earth
for new trees
to spring up the hill-side to the very sky.
That we should be insensible at such a time
Makes deafness kill and peace the bloodier crime.
Clive Ali Chimmo Branson (1907– February 25 1944) was an English poet, artist and communist. He fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war. He was killed in action in Burma in 1944. This poem is taken from The Selected Poems of Clive Branson (ed Richard Knott, Smokestack, 2022), and has inspired the title of an anthology marking the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, The Rose Held In The Teeth, now available from Culture Matters.
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