I like visiting the square after the noise, after a meeting, when no one is left.
The empty podium.
The microphone turned off.
The barriers still in place.
Colorful papers sliding, dancing across the ground, run over by passing cars… shedding phrases, ideas that until a few hours ago seemed worthy of an altar.
With a breath of fresh air, everything seems small again.
The banner that covered a façade is only fabric.
The loudspeaker, a black box returning to the telecom agency’s truck.
The words that dressed the walls will begin to fold, to peel away at the corners…
And yet, something takes longer to fade.
I couldn’t say exactly what.
Perhaps it is a voice.
The feeling of having listened for too long to an outside voice that eventually found its way into our minds. Those phrases that keep circling through the body, striking intimate, unforeseen chords.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that vibration too. That dense time in the empty square, the presence of a mandate that is not our own, yet perhaps accepted as such. Sometimes it is frightening to realize how much of who we believe ourselves to be is, in truth, the repetition of someone else’s voice.
By the next morning, someone will have already gathered the flags.
The barriers will vanish.
The microphone will be nothing more than a fleeting echo. But there are words that resist leaving the square.
What voices inhabit your own square today? Which ones have remained, making noise, even though the dictator has ceded control to you?
Today, returning to Bocas, I thought of this—of all of this.
The poem and its videopoem Bocas are part of the poetry volume Ritmo de lucha · Ostinato.
Si todavía no lo conoces este poemario, puedes encontrarlo aquí: RITMO DE LUCHA · OSTINATO
It is part of the Innersea Poetry · Contemporary Spanish Poetry series.
At nightfall, someone always arrives with a broom to tend to the ground.
No one comes for the mind. That takes a little more effort.
Eva
AnyWayEva · Words · Music · Stage · anywayeva.com · @anywayeva
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Si aun no has leído la primera carta, puedes encontrarla aquí: [Yesterday I found a key]