Some English show a pride in family
who volunteered to join Spain´s Civil War,
seeing it as an anti-fascist fight.

I sat and watched a film about the wreck,
in terms of deaths the worst that Spain has had.
Some in the audience were the sons
of those who´d witnessed it in long gone days.
They said that no-one ate the fish for months,
knowing they feasted on the corpses there.

There was no joy shown by the men who sunk
the Castillo Olite on that day.
No joy at halting Franco´s troops a while.
Horror pervades. Spanish against their own.
The loss of life left them no space for pride,
a boat of humans not a fascist crew,
men like themselves but on the other side,
dying within sight of the nearby land.
The octagenarians telling these tales are dead,
dead as their fellow men that drowned that day.

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Fiona Pitt-Kethley is the author of more than 20 books of prose or poetry published by Chatto and WIndus, Abacus, Peter Owen, Sinclair-Stevenson, Arcadia Books and smaller presses. She has also published many articles in the Independent, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, London Review of Books and other magazines and newspapers. She lives in Spain.