:: Ismael Serrano ::

They're taking away the memories,
in history all that remains is a stain, a blotch.
While everyone else has amnesia,
an old man remembers a song

of a far away battle,
where he could've died
in a lost war,
sometimes he asks me about you.

He still thinks himself in the trenches,
another flag, another color,
flying solemnly in the wind,
over the peak and in his living room.

Sometimes he talks to ghosts
whose names he forgot.
Defetead, they never returned
from their internal exile.

Not even a moment, a remembrance,
for those who lost, for those who built
the tomb, the mausoleum,
of misery, of the butcher.

How did you expect to win without them
the battles they previously lost?
If someone's to shut up, it's them,
those who signed pacts of silence.

They're trying to convince you, old man,
explosions are long gone.
But when he goes out in the street,
Madrid looks like it's been bombed.

And he can read in the walls,
cries from those he fought,
and characters with darkened faces
who taught him what terror was.

And one day, inadvertently,
the old man, with his stories, just faded.
And in his grandson's memory
just a small trace, a slight blot,

from that far away battle,
where he could've died,
in a lost war
where he fought for you.

Where he fought for you.

1.- The defeated side: the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).