Good Friday

The sun of April is ardent still, and good,

and the furrow of expectation shines;

but today do not fill its longing breast,

because Jesus suffers.

Do not stir the earth. Let go, meekly,

the hand from the plow; abandon the fields

when they are already returning to us the hope

that even Jesus suffers.

Already the blood has run under the olives

and three times he has heard one he loved deny him.

but -- rebel of love -- his heart still beats,

still suffers.

Because you, harvestman, sow hate

and I nurse my rancor at dusk,

and a boy walks like a weeping man,

Jesus suffers.

He is still on the wooden frame

and his lip trembles with terrible thirst.

I hate my bread -- my verse -- my happiness,

because Jesus suffers.


~Gabriela Mistral

To The Hebrew People

Pogroms in Poland

Jewish race, flesh of pain,

Jewish race, river of bitterness

like the heavens and the earth, endure,

and nurture still your forest of cries.

Your wounds have never wanted for air;

never stopped you stretching out in the shade

to wring and renew your bandage,

redder than any rose.

The world has been lulled with your moans,

and it plays with the strands of your lamentation;

the furrows of your face, that I love so much,

like the deep cuts of a saw.

Trembling the women rock their child,

trembling the man cuts his sheaf,

the nightmare kneels in your dream

your word is only the miserere.

Jewish race, there even remains in you

breast and honeyed voice to praise your hearthstones;

to recite the Song of Songs, though broken

your tongue, your lip, your heart.

In your woman Mary still walks,

over your visage moves the profile of Christ;

from the slope of Zion they have seen him

call you in vain, as the day dies…

Seeing your pain in the Good Thief

he said that immense word to him;

to annoint his feet he looks for the braid

of the Magdalene, and finds it bloodied.

Jewish race, flesh of pain,

Jewish race, river of bitterness

like the heavens and the earth, endure,

and nurture your wide forest of cries.


~Gabriela Mistral

In the Ear of Christ

I

Christ, with your fresh-sliced skin:

Christ, with your river-emptying veins:

these poor people of the world are dead

of laxity, of fear, of cold.

You are at the head of their beds,

(if they have you), in a form too bloody,

without the tenderness that women love,

and with those marks of violent life.

They would not spit at you for being crazy,

but they would not be able to love you either,

their impetus is too slack, too worn.

Because like Lazarus they already stink, already stink;

better not to move, than to disintegrate.

Not love -- not hate -- wrings a cry from them.

II

They admire the elegance of gesture and color:

but in your wooden contortion --

your blood-sweat, your last shudder,

and the purple brilliance of Calvary --

it seems to them there is exaggeration

and plebeian taste; one who wept like you,

had thirst and suffering, would not let

those two bright tears congeal in his eyes.

Their own are dull eyes of damp tinder

without virtue of weeping (that cleans and cools);

their mouths are loose buttons,

wet and lascivious (not firm, not red),

and like the end of autumn: so unstrung

and polluted the cores of their hearts.

III

Oh Christ! May pain make that soul alive,

which you gave them and which has fallen asleep,

return it, deep and sensitive,

to the house of bitterness, passion, and outcry.

Gaffs, irons, claws which tear your flesh

as if it were fruit or a sheaf being shared;

flames that catch on your sectioned flesh,

flames like rings or knives --

weeping, weeping in warm streams,

renew the cloudy glass of those eyes

and restore the old fire of their gaze.

Sprout them from your innermost heart, Christ!

Or if that is impossible, if they are ruined bedstraw,

come down, and scatter them on the winds.


~Gabriela Mistral

Bistolfi's Cross

Cross that no one sees, that we all feel --

invisible and certain as a wide mountain --

we sleep on you, and on you we live:

your two arms rock us; your shadow bathes us.

Love pretended to make a bed for us, but it was

only your living gaff and your naked beam.

We believed we were running free through the fields

and we never descended from your clench.

Your wood is all of fresh, human blood,

and on you I breathe in my father’s wounds,

and on the dream-nail that wounded you I die.

The lie, that we have seen the nights and days!

We were caught -- as the son on the mother --

on you: from the first wail, to the last agony.


~Gabriela Mistral

Rodin's Thinker

With his chin fallen on his rough hand

the Thinker remembers he is flesh of the tomb:

mortal flesh naked to fate,

flesh that hates death and shivered at beauty.

And shivered in love, all of his burning spring;

and now in autumn sinks into truth and sadness.

The memento mori passes over his brow

all in sharp bronze, as night begins.

And in his anguish, his muscles tear, suffering.

The furrows of his flesh fill with terrors;

they tear like the autumn leaf, to the strong Master

who calls them to bronze… and there is no tree twisted

by the sun of the plain, nor lion with wounded side,

contorted as this man who thinks of death.


~Gabriela Mistral