Like The Gazelle

—Photo by Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

SISTER
—Gabriela Mistral, 1889-1957

Today I saw a woman plowing a furrow. Her hips are 

broad, like mine, for love, and she goes about her work

bent over the earth.

I caressed her waist; I brought her home with me. She

will drink rich milk from my own glass and bask in the

shade of my arbors growing pregnant with the pregnancy

of love. And if my own breasts be not generous, my son

will put his lips to hers, that are rich.

(trans. from the Spanish by Langston Hughes)

______________________

MIDNIGHT

—Gabriela Mistral

Fineness of midnight.

I hear the nodes of the rosebush:
the sap pushes, raising the rose.

I hear 

the burnt stripes of the Bengal

tiger: they don't let him sleep.

I hear 

someone's poem

and in the night it swells in him

like the sand dune.

I hear

my mother asleep,

breathing for us both.

(I sleep inside her.

I'm five.)

I hear the Rhone

descending and carrying me like a father

blind in blind foam.

Then nothing.

I am falling

inside the walls of Arles

full of sun . . .

(trans. by David Garrison)

_____________________

DROPS OF GALL

—Gabriela Mistral

Don't sing: a song

always sticks to your

tongue: the song that was to be surrendered.

Don't kiss: the kiss

by a strange curse

always lingers where the heart doesn't reach.

Pray, pray, for it is pleasing, but know

that your greedy tongue won't say

the only Lord's Prayer to save you.

And don't call on death for mercy,

for in the flesh of immense whiteness

a live shred feels the rock

that smothers you

and the voracious worm upbraiding you.

(trans. by David Garrison)

_____________________

DEATH SONNET I

—Gabriela Mistral

From the icy niche where men placed you

I lower your body to the sunny, poor earth.

They didn't know I too must sleep in it

and dream on the same pillow.

I place you in the sunny ground, with a

mother's sweet care for her napping child,

and the earth will be a soft cradle 

when it receives your hurt childlike body.

I scatter bits of earth and rose dust, 

and in the moon's airy and blue powder

what is left of you is a prisoner.

I leave singing my lovely revenge.

No hand will reach into the obscure depth

to argue with me over your handful of bones.

(trans. by David Garrison)

____________________

Today's LittleNip:

DUSK

—Gabriela Mistral

I feel my heart melting

in the mildness like candles:

my veins are slow oil

and not wine,

and I feel my life fleeing

hushed and gentle like the gazelle.

(trans. by Davis Garrison)

____________________

—Medusa

An earnest Kevin Jones reading at Poetry With Legs

at the Shine Cafe last Wednesday night

—Photo by Michelle Kunert