Atocha 2004
by David Bunn
The Caliph at Córdoba had a dizzying pool—
quicksilver from his mines at Almadén
sent glints and highlights wavering through the air
and set his guests and courtiers’ heads to whirl.
It’s ruined now—the palace’s grand halls
unroofed and broken open to the sky.
On the all-night train from Lisbon to Madrid,
rumbling through the outskirts in the early dawn,
still gloomy, so the braziers flare bright
in trackside encampments and wrecking yards,
I think of commuters who check the time and yawn,
who’ll be blown apart at the station up ahead.
There’s a story that the bombs were to avenge
the last destruction of al-Andalus
which the Catholic Monarchs launched from Córdoba,
wresting Granada lovely from the Moors
five hundred years ago—itself revenge
for Arab conquest, eight hundred years before.
When they bombed Atocha we were safe at home
but preparing our first Spanish trip,
and our friends asked us if we’d ‘cut and run’—
crude words which mimicked the Australian Right
still glorying in the capture of Baghdad.
But not to go would feel like giving in.
At Barcelona there’s a mercury fountain:
quicksilver ripples out across the bowl,
in memory of the miners of Almadén
who rebelled from despair in ’34,
who Franco, soon a rebel, came to crush.
This shimmering device revenges them.
Now we’re at Atocha six months beyond the blast.
Angry tourists wave their tickets in the air,
urgent to board the fast train to Barcelona:
as if there’s no call for the guard and his gun,
as if six months ago those travellers didn’t die,
as if bombers didn’t die their murderous death.
We’ve run to see Guernica, ate our paella,
rushed to send emails home to our kids,
eager—Catalonia and France lie ahead—
but surrounded by all Spain’s silent dead.
David Bunn was born in 1946. For the last three years, with wildly inadequate skills, he has been translating the French poet René Char’s challenging post-war collection Fureur et Mystère.