As much as we love summer and want everything to be nice and relaxed, or attractive and exciting, the reality is that life goes on at its own pace, and death, of course, is the last step. Not only that, but we can also take advantage of free time to honor the dead, to talk to them. If it is necessary, even to anger them, let us not be hypocrites.
Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960) published this poem in her book El guant de plàstic rosa (Ausiàs March award, Edicions 62, 2017, translated by Miriam Reyes in The pink plastic glove, Marisma, 2018), and if it weren't for the title, perhaps it would be difficult for us to realize that it speaks of a cemetery, but we have “letters and numbers”, the sacred trees, the cypresses, the Borgian labyrinth –and who has never been lost in a cemetery?–...
“You will stay here”, he tells the companion, the deceased, and we also read the shaking, the stone, the wood and how the gravediggers introduce the coffin into the niche, and also the shock of the “millions of unconnected words”.
We all have dead and we all have people we miss, even among the living, and we have those cemeteries of memory where we have buried what bothered us and what we didn't want to know anything about. If we are aware, perhaps it will not be necessary for them to remain buried and we will be able to dialogue, we will not have to drag them and perhaps we will travel lighter during our vital journey, passing the days and pushing the years, until they are over and someone takes us to the place of eternal rest, to the last resting place.
Catalan version, here
