CHERRIES AND HAIL Poem by Ramón Cote Baraibar

for María Baranda
Everything happened in the first week of March
when at last the cherries fell.

And they did not fall because they were ripe, round, rotund,
but because of the hail and its inexplicable ire.

After the storm, on the compact whiteness of the park
minimal spots of purple colour

began to sprout, here and there,
like the wedding dress of a stabbed bride.

The tough February prohibition and the excessive greed
among the high branches were the cause of the avalanche of children

who did not mind cutting their lips with the glass snow
so long as they could burst the peel between their teeth.

When, many years from now, someone asks them
about the definitive flavour that brings back their childhood

they will not hesitate to say the flavour of those cherries,
the flavour of vengeance those frozen cherries had,

and they will immediately add that everything happened
in the first week of March long ago, after a storm,

when the hail of the park was slowly stained with red,
and afterwards their breath, and the tips of their fingers,

and also their memory, bleeding, recalling all of that.