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

Except Food

I have more of my life under control than most people, I think. I love both my jobs, which put me contact with interesting people and afford many warm friendships, and for which I pretty much set my own hours. I have always followed an exercise routine, which is modest but keeps me strong enough to lug my massage table over a few blocks and up a couple flights of stairs without puffing. For years, I have studied one foreign language or another for an hour or two a day. I have time to write poems and little lyrical essays. I read interesting books. I spend time with my family. I get out into nature once a week or so. I can afford what I buy and know precisely where my money goes. I don't drink, smoke, or dope. I'm my own master.

Except for food, of course. Food is ridiculous.

There's a dreary family history behind this, a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, as Stephen Dedalus might say. Everything about food is supercharged with meaning: it is the axis of coercion and liberty, pleasure and death-wish. Every encounter with food is some sort of showdown. It's totally crazy. No way to live.

It used to be worse. There used to be orgies of potato chips alternating with oreos, enormous restaurant meals that left me uncomfortably full, daily multiple soda pops. I would eat until I couldn't eat any more, but I was almost always hungry. My evenings generally consisted of settling in with an entertaining-but-not-challenging book and bags of chips and cookies. I'd read for hours, and when replete with one sort of snack, I'd switch to another for relief. It is rather horrible to look back on: I'd get terribly sick if I did that now.

So the present state of insanity, which includes perhaps five restaurant breakfasts per week, of astonishing volume and unhealthiness, and seven fast-food dinners per week from Burgerville, bless them -- is in fact a step UP from that. Sad but true. And in the last year or two my project of wedging a cup or two of broccoli and a large salad into every day has been running a success rate of about 50%, which is something.

But the fact is that the next step -- which will, incidentally, save us at least $7,000.00 a year -- has to be cooking and eating almost exclusively at home. It's going to be a major life overhaul. I've started: I have the breakfast proof-of-concept now. (That five breakfasts per week? It used to be seven).

I find the scale of the project daunting. But it's the last piece of my life that I really want to be different.

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