A small hedge opens and closes Espinoza Lafuente's poem: "It was a Sunday, perhaps." The speaker cannot be sure of the day, yet remembers the freshly sanded truck, the chapped hands and the feel of the water. That gap between sharp detail and shaky certainty is the poem's real subject. It recalls one childhood day at a river with the family, then shows an adult who has come back to the same place and found that time has quietly rearranged everything.
The first stanza is concrete and a little strange. Grandpa's "newly-sanded truck" is a tactile detail, an object someone has cared for. The father greets "the peasants, ours were with chapped hands", and the syntax is ambiguous enough that the family's own hands may be among those chapped ones. The adults then chat about "the Devil's apparition in the oak's trunk," folklore treated as casual gossip. The only near-rhyme in the poem closes this stanza, as "truck" in the first line returns as "trunk" in the third. Machine and tree are bound together by sound, and the childhood world feels solid and connected.
The next three stanzas build a litany on the repeated phrase "That day." The children splash naked, "guarding what would only come back with the years," a paradox that suggests they were already keeping something safe without knowing what it was. Music "would lower itself" onto the family reunion, as though it were a blanket or a hush. The children "named the things by its name," a slightly unidiomatic phrase that nonetheless gives the moment a feeling of first things, of the world being learned. Their confidence is stated like a proverb: the eldest will care for the younger, and the youngest will learn from the rest. The balanced phrasing sounds sure of itself, which makes it more poignant later.
The fourth stanza is the emotional peak. "To dive inside the tide" is held together by the chiming of "dive" and "tide." Rivers do not usually have tides, so the word seems chosen for its sense of pull, of something larger moving beneath the swimmers. Diving becomes "the reason to be what we wanted to be, / to stay where we wanted to stay," and then comes the short last line, "holding our breath." The line is brief enough to make the reader hold theirs. Holding your breath underwater is also a wish to stop time, to stay under the surface where nothing changes.
The stanzas lengthen as the poem goes on: three lines, three, three, four, then six. Time seems to overflow the form. The free verse has no regular meter or rhyme, and the long, indented lines move with the looseness of spoken memory. Once "That day" disappears, the rhythm changes. "Years run after years" has the phrase chasing itself, and the next image is "our creased fingers." They recall the earlier "chapped hands" and suggest the speaker has grown into the adults he once watched. "Creased" may also be the wrinkling of fingers after long immersion, so the water and the years leave the same mark.
What follows is the poem's quietest blow: "only the river had enough trust on us." The childhood confidence that older siblings would protect younger ones is not repeated or confirmed. The poem does not say why, and the reader can only infer that those promises did not survive, or that the people who made them are no longer there. The line "Fewer is left to say" has a weary, inverted syntax, as though even the grammar has run short.
The ending contrasts the river with the "same old cobbled path." The path is fixed and worn, while the river was the thing the children entered. The speaker returned "yesterday or last week," so even the recent past has blurred. Then the opening hedge returns, and "it was a Sunday, perhaps" now fits two days at once, the remembered one and the one of the return.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty. It never claims to recover childhood, only to show how it persists, as vivid fragments inside an uncertain frame. Its ordinary Sunday, with a truck, a river and relatives talking about the Devil, becomes something held in the breath for as long as it can be.