“She speaks with an accent of her savage seas,
with who knows what algae and who knows what sands;
she recites prayer to God without baggage or burden,
aged as if she were dying.
In the vegetable garden that made us foreign,
she has placed cactus and unfurled herbs.
She glows with the desert’s heavy breath,
and she has loved with a passion that bleaches her,
that she never talks about and that if she told us
would be like mapping some other star.
She will live among us for eighty years,
but always as if she’s just arrived,
speaking a language that gasps and moans,
understood just by little beasties.
And she’s going to die in our midst,
some night she most suffers,
with only her fate for a pillow,
from a death both quiet and foreign.”
Translated from Spanish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and David Shook