The Dancer

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.

En el cafe

In the Cafe by Clementina Suarez

Every day I sit in the cafe
as if I could push time ahead.
Everything around us is misery and suffering
even the way we speak.

There are those
who hope that someone
will appear
to pay for their cup of coffee.
(My God, fifteen cents.)

Women worn out from life
with the true weariness of the flesh...

This immense solitude, this absence, when does it attack?
Where does the drama begin or end?
It would be enough just to close one's eyes
and enjoy seeing one's self
close, so close.

In fact who isn't happy that way
Like a peaceful sky
Still and deaf amid the blood's turbulence.
What a restful life. Will I ever know it?
No, it's not what I want,
I don't want to let go of my anguish.
I don't want a prison for my soul,
but prefer to swim in the shadows.

I tell myself:
I have to grow,
inevitably
children stand
before me

I am barefoot with them
looking for bread
in my small hands.

Your Eyes, Moorish Slaves

Your Eyes, Moorish Slaves by Delmira Agustini

In your coldness were ensconced
The great Moorish slaves;
Dark and shining in golds
From a distance they guarded me.

And, devouring, they dreamt
In me, I know not what treasures...
Behind the crystal of tears
They guarded and threatened.

They beat angelic wings,
They pounded satanic hands,
Their two strange screens;

And when I look upon them coquettishly,
Their fiery halberds
Pierced my entrails.

It is said
women give [and give and give]
voice and expression
to the oppressed.

I find a hunger in my belly for
something of substance. Of value.
That tastes like it smells
and hurts like it bleeds.
For reality, for honesty, for truth.


---------------


your voices echo across
the land and sea into our
conscience and the condition
of your child and your fellow man
tells some truth beyond
me and the sun rises here
just like it might there but
our women rise to the sun
in a different way

we are all rising in the sun
and speaking of the ways in which we
wish to live- like saints we sing
the song of woman or the song
of desperation
we will rise and we will speak of
how the sun rises slowly upon
the backs of the beautiful
bent-double masses of the
world who taste no bread and
work the calluses into their
hands only to find that they
will never taste the extremes
of what it means to be free

she woke with the sun and
painted her lifetime upon the
washing stand while singing
about another land
where the dancers smile
and the coffee is free,
and how the slaves sang
until midnight of the night of
their liberation

she awoke among the undeniable
truths of her life and spoke to
the farthest shores