Madrid o6

This weekend PFFC travel to Madrid for the 13th Football friendly tour.

We go to play football, to eat, and to talk (as well as seeing the long-lost Filipo Ricci).

We also go in the belief that football can promote peace and friendship across both pitches and borders.

This year saw the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. As we visit Madrid we will be commemorating those who died in the struggle for freedom and those who lost their lives in the Madrid bombings of March 2004.


Bombing Casualties: Spain

Dolls' faces are rosier but these were children
their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle
dark lenses in whose quicksilvery glances
the sunlight quivered. These blenched lips
were warm once and bright with blood
but blood
held in a moist bleb of flesh
not spilt and spatter'd in touseled hair.

In these shadowy tresses
red petals did not always
thus clot and blacken to a scar.

These are dead faces:
wasps' nests are not more wanly waxen
wood embers not so grely ashen.

They are laid out in ranks
like paper lanterns that have fallen
after a night of riot
extinct in the dry morning air.

Herbert Read

Recommended by Club Treasurer Owen Mather