Saturday, March 12, 2011


A woman is singing in the valley. The shadows falling blot her out, but her song spreads over the fields.
. . . .

Her song, as pure as water filled with light, cleanses the plain and rinses the mean air of day in which men hate. From the throat of the woman who keeps on singing, day rises nobly evaporating toward the stars.

-- Gabriela Mistral
(translated by Langston Hughes)
(in Women in Praise of the Sacred,
edited by Jane Hirshfield)

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