Gabriela Mistral

THE STRANGER

_"She speaks with the accent of her wild seas

Of I know not what seaweeds, of I know not what sands;

She worships a god without bulk or weight,

Old as if she would die.

This garden of ours which she estranged from us

She sowed with cactus and thorn.

She exhales the breath of the desert.

And she loved with a piercing passion

She never tells us of, and which, if she told,

Would be the map of another star.

She will live among us for eighty years

But always seem newly come,

With that language of hers which moans and pants

And only creatures of the field understand.

And she is going to die in our midst

Some night of her worst affliction,

With only her fate for a pillow,

Of a death unspoken and strange."