Their horses are black.
Their horseshoes are black.
On their cloaks shine stains
of ink and wax.
They have skulls of lead
and cannot cry.
With their black leather souls
they ride down the road.
Hunchbacked, nocturnal,
where they stir they command
dark rubber silence
and fears of fine sand.
García Lorca, The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard.

On August 19, 1936, playwright and poet Federico García Lorca was taken from a jail cell in the city of Granada, escorted to a courtyard in the hills outside the city, and executed, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters who had fought in the city’s defence against Francisco Franco‘s rebellion.

His killers were Fascist militiamen whose leaders had long before targeted the poet for murder, for it was clear where his sympathies lay; he once said, "After all, I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”

García Lorca had been persecuted for some time by the authorities for his beliefs, lifestyle and writings - they described him as a “socialist and a freemason,” who was guilty of “homosexual and abnormal practices”. “The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war” said Franco.

García Lorca was only beginning to attain widespread fame outside Spain at the time of his death, although he had been well known within the country for a decade, ever since the publication of his Gypsy Ballads and plays that included Blood Wedding, all of which spoke to the innermost recesses of the Andalusian soul through the cante jondo, the “deep song.”

It may have been that the unreflective-fascist Franco disliked the soul-searching capability of García Lorca’s verse; certainly the dictator despised gypsies. During the three-quarters of a century since his death, García Lorca has entered the canon of world poetry and theatre, an eternal rebuke to the enemies of liberty who killed him and to all their kind.
Pictured: Lorca, in 1925 in the Mountains near Madrid. Photograph by Luis Buñuel.

Take This Waltz by Leonard Cohen, based on the poem "Pequeño Vals Vienés" by Federico Garcia Lorca. With beautiful imagery of the poet: