THE SOLDIERS

A blink of dust, my grandfather was shooting because he had to defend a homeland.

I have not been in battle but I have fought many wars.
Black crosses on the heart and mud on the hands.

My grandfather was in the trenches, risking his life to defend our nation from the Nazis.

I did not know that there were men exterminating children.

Last beats for wars that have begun and never ended. Flowers on the graves of friends and girlfriends, stars fallen in the desert sunlight.

Rivers that fill the houses with tears, honors without choice, a deserted pit.
Children who scream and have no guilt.

War kills whoever decides it but whoever makes it is still dying.

( To all the dead sons, to all the dead fathers, to all the dead daughters and the dead mothers. To all the people who died from causes decided by other people. R.I.P) 

LOOK INTO MY TRUNK

I don’t know if any of you have a chest or trunk where you keep your memories. Sometimes the door of the past opens and many things related to our childhood come out. I opened the trunk of my memory and what I found is beautiful. My grandmother had this trunk, which was actually a chest, which served as a coat rack and bag storage, on which we children sat and imagined driving a carriage, complete with a simulation of the noise of the horses’ hooves, beating the timed heels on dark wooden board. This trunk, however, escaped its textbook location because it was in the corridor and did nothing but feed our curiosity as city children looking for new pastimes with which to pleasantly fill the long afternoons spent at grandmother’s house, slippers with heels and television on those TV programs that she called “useless things”. Although curious, we were not used to approaching the trunk in the corridor too frequently because we felt a sort of awe, most likely infused us by our parents, since inside there were “grandmother’s things that if you touch them she realizes and gets angry “. But one day I took courage and asked my grandmother to show me what was hidden in the trunk. She opened it and in the midst of letters, my grandfather’s military clothes, old newspapers and strange objects, photos of her past came out. I looked at that world in black and white and I wondered what colors the clothes and eyes of those people who unconsciously stared at me immortal from the photo cards had had. I asked my grandmother for the names of multitudes of objects unknown to me, information on their function, on what they had done, if the iron was really as comfortable as it seemed from the relaxed expression of a relative portrayed in the moment of starching a shirt. squares with an indecipherable color. And my grandmother promptly answered all my questions, standing, elbows resting on a round table now full of photographs; she seemed younger to me and it was easy for me to see in her the signs of that girl who survived the war.