Joan Margarit

Do you remember? Joana had died.
You and I were going by car northwards,
to the flat that faces the sea,
and we listened to this symphony.
We began the journey
on a luminous morning. In the music
the day was made of walls covered in ice,
shadows of passers-by with half-empty sacks
and sledges with corpses on the lake.
Like a runway in the sun,
the motorway ran onwards and, behind the sounds,
there stretched the fog from the howitzers
and tank-tracks in the snow.
It was a blue-gold July morning
sparkling on the crystal sea.
In the brass and strings was the echo
of glory, which is always in the past,
rejecting, always rejecting, life.
At night there remained only the murmur
of the waves below the terrace.
In us, though, just as in the music,
there raged the storm of snow and iron
that is unleashed when a page of history turns.