The mothers' poems.

• Author: Mistral, Gabriela
• Position: LATITUDES - Poem - Reprint

--One afternoon, walking along a miserable street in Temuco, I saw a village woman sitting in the doorway of her shack. She was very pregnant, and her face revealed a profound bitterness.

A man walked by her, and made a crude remark, and she blushed.

At that moment I felt all the solidarity of sex, the infinite pity of woman for woman, and I went away thinking:

--One of us ought to speak (since men haven't done so) of the sacredness of this painful and divine condition. If the purpose of art is to make everything beautiful, with an immense mercy, why haven't we purified, for the eyes of the impure, this?

And I wrote these poems with an almost religious intention.

Some of those women who, in order to be pure, have to shut their eyes to the pain of real life, made vicious comments about the poems, which saddened me, for their sake. They even insinuated I shouldn't publish them.

In this selfish work, diminished in my own eyes by this selfishness, perhaps such human stories...