I usually avoid explaining my paintings. People always read their own meanings into them anyway.  But after reading “Stranger” by Gabriela Mistral, I couldn’t keep her passionate words and images out of my head. (16″ x 19″ Acrylic)

Here’s the poem translated by Langston Hughes. Enjoy!

Stranger  by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)

She speaks in a slight accent about her wild seas
with God knows what seaweeds and God knows what sands;
so old it’s as if she herself were dying, she prays to a god with no volume and no weight.
She has sown cactus and claw-like grasses
in gardens of ours that she makes strange.
She draws her breath from the panting of the desert
and loves with a passion all that it whitens,
all that never says anything and if it should it would be like the map of another planet.
Were she to live in our midst for eight years
it would be always as though she had just come,
speaking in a language that pants and moans and that is understood only by beasts.
And some night when her suffering is greatest
from a death both silent and strange,
she is going to die right here among us
with nothing but her fate for a pillow.”

Advertisement