A woman is singing in the valley. The shadows falling blot her out, but her song spreads over the fields.
Her heart is broken, like the jar she dropped this afternoon among the pebbles in the brook. As she sings, the hidden wound sharpens on the thread of her song, and becomes thin and hard. Her voice in modulation dampens with blood.
In the fields the other voices die with the dying day, and a moment ago the song of the last slow-poke bird stopped. But her deathless heart, alive with grief, gathers all the silent voices into her voice, sharp now, yet very sweet.
Does she sing for a husband who looks at her silently in the dusk, or for a child whom her song caresses? Or does she sing for her own heart, more helpless than a babe at nightfall?
Night grows maternal before this song that goes to meet it; the stars, with a sweetness that is human, are beginning to come out; the sky full of stars becomes human and understands the sorrows of this world.
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 towards the stars.
(translated by Langston Hughes)

GABRIELA MISTRAL (1889 – 1957) was born in Chile. Dismissed from school because she was not gifted enough, she continued to study on her own and eventually became a teacher. She later fell in love with a young man whose suicide changed her life and her mourning resulted in an outpouring of poetry. Her poetry and prose-poems soon received international recognition; she also became an educational reformer.
In 1920, a 16-year boy brought her his first verses and she told him, “You are poet and you must keep writing. I have never said this to anyone before.” The boy was Pablo Neruda.
She never had children but much of her writing centers on the theme of motherhood. In mid-life she adopted a son who committed suicide at 17, mirroring her earlier tragedy.
Mistral traveled widely and served in many diplomatic posts. She became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. She considered herself to be a voice for the powerless, especially women and children. Her epitaph reads, “What the soul does for the body, the poet does for her people.”

As this is Mother’s Day weekend, I was looking for a poem that reflected some aspect of motherhood without being too sentimental or maudlin. I choose this one for its delicate combination of sweetness and sorrow. “Her heart is broken like the jar she dropped this afternoon.” In a sideways sort of way the poem reminds me of the Pieta sculpture of Mary holding her dead son. The tie between mother and children is a profound one and is a symbol of continuity and the ever-flowing expression of the creative. I like her statement about soul and the poet.