The Dancer by Gabriela Mistral
The dancer now is dancing
the dance of losing it all.
Whatever she said, she lets it go,
fathers and brothers, gardens and fields,
the sound of her river, the roads,
her fireside tale, her face,
her name, and the games of her childhood,
as if she were letting everything fall
from her back, her breast, her soul.
On the edge of night and winter
laughing, she dances total poverty.
In the world she's winnowing away,
the loving, hating, smiling, killing world,
earth crushed to a bloody vintage,
night with its sleepless excesses,
and the ache of homelessness.
Without name or creed or people, stripped
or everything and of herself, she gives from the core
beautiful, pure, with flying feet.
Shaken like a tree and in the eye
of the tornado, she bears witness.
She isn't dancing the flight of albatross,
salt-spattered, sport of the waves,
nor the lift and bow
of reed-beds in the wind,
nor the wind that fills the sail,
nor the smile of the high grass.
She isn't called by her baptismal name.
She loosed herself from caste and flesh,
buried the beat of her blood
and the ballad of her adolescence.
Without knowing it we throw our lives
over her like a poisonous red garment.
And so she dances while vipers
crawl on her, biting, quick and free,
and let her drop like a tattered wreath,
the banner of a defeated army.
Sleepwalking, turned into what she hates,
she dances on, not knowing she is changed,
her gestures scattering and gathering,
gasping out gasping breaths,
cutting the air that brings her no relief,
alone, a whirlwind, foul and pure.
We, we are the gasping of her breast,
her bloodless pallor, the wild cry
she sends from west to east,
the red fever of her veins,
the loss of the God of her childhood.
