Harold Norse: We Bumped Off Your Friend The Poet

Based on a review by Cyril Connolly, Death in Granada, on the last days of Garcia Lorca, The Sunday Times (London), May 20, 1973


We bumped off your friend the poet
with the big fat head this morning

We left him in a ditch

I fired 2 bullets into his ass
for being queer

I was one of the people
who went to get Lorca
and that’s what I said to Rosales

My name is Ruiz Alonzo
ex-typographer
Right-wing deputy
alive and kicking
Falangist to the end

Nobody bothers me
I got protection
The Guardia Civil are my friends

Because he was a poet
was he better than anyone else?

He was a goddamn fag
and we were sick and tired
of fags in Granada

The black assassination squads
kept busy
liquidating professors
doctors lawyers students
like the good old days of the Inquisition!

General Queipo de Llano
had a favorite phrase
“Give him coffee, plenty of coffee!”
When Lorca was arrested

we asked the General what to do

“Give him coffee, plenty of coffee!”

So we took him out in the hills and shot him
I’d like to know what’s wrong with that
He was queer with Leftist leanings

Didn’t he say
I don’t believe in political frontiers?

Didn’t he say
The capture of Granada in 1492
by Ferdinand and Isabella
was a disastrous event?

Didn’t he call Granada a wasteland
peopled by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain?

a queer Communist poet?

General Franco owes me a medal
for putting 2 bullets up his ass


San Francisco, 1973