Colcha

tan poquito el amor luego perderlo

23 tan poquito el amor luego perderlo these words come forty years late. the church bells which signaled the end of the second world war have rested their tired hips. they are silent now except for days when the wind comes off the llano and makes them groan. the war ended in a rush of bells, and my mother, in front of her house, a child, began to dance. she has often told me that she never knew why the bells were ringing. she simply knew they were ringing and began to dance. forty years later she works tortillas in the kitchen. i imagine her, a child, i hear bells scaring the sparrows from the tower where they make their nests. i imagine the sound of bells running through adobe and resting its tired voice in the red willows. perhaps the bells told the oldest story on earth, men returning from war, children dancing. my words are those bells my mother heard as a child. they run through me and perch on my memory like a good angle of sun. this letter i write forty years too late is like the bells, destined to fall silent as if i relinquished them in some quiet handshake, as if they were meant to travel by touch. my mother tells me about the bells that ended the second world war. she is proof that they rang. that for a brief moment she was in love with sound, and years later still in love with their story. i have made the bells my own. i know that someday they will be lost. that in some dry august they will stop ringing as if they shouldn’t have but finally as if they must. i hope that when i am gone someone will ring the bells for whatever adobe still stands, for whatever war has ended, as if something which were lost should be celebrated. ...