‘They Destroyed Our Radios and Televisions’ by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas
From Words Without Borders:
They destroyed our radios and televisions
to leave us without images,
without those maudlin songs
that lulled our past to sleep
back when we still believed in trains
by the seaside, at the ranch where Laura
carried her milk churns to the river
to meet the prince on horseback,
kissing the stamping steed on the mouth
like in Gwendolyn’s garden,
abandoned to what they called love.
They made us spend nights
reading Barthes and Derrida
until words came undone
in our hands and nothing had more value
than what it could have had but never did
as if promises and the past
were one and the same. We could only
love dead women, on screens
they appeared naked and desolate, the most beautiful
was the one whose body was covered in down,
a dead child at her breast.
Our eyes beheld only grief.
