Daily Poem: Slow Rain – Gabriela Mistral
Slow Rain
~ Gabriela Mistral
Translated from the Spanish by Gunda Kaiser and James Tipton
This water, sad and fearful,
like a child who suffers,
before touching the Earth,
fades away.
Calm the wind, calm the tree—
but in the tremendous silence,
this lean, bitter song
is falling.
The sky is like a heart,
immense, opening up, bitter,
it is not rain; it is a bleeding,
long, and slow.
Men in houses
do not feel this bitterness,
this sad flow of water
out of the heavens.
This long and tiring descent
of conquered water,
towards Earth, recumbent,
and paralysed!
It is raining . . . . and like a tragic jackal
the night watches over the land.
What is going to spring up, in the shadow,
out of Mother Earth?
Will you sleep, while outside
falls suffering, this slow water,
this lethal water, sister
of death?
