Children’s Hair - Gabriela Mistral

Soft hair, hair that is all the softness of the world:

without you lying in my lap, what silk would I enjoy?

sweet the passing day because of that silk, sweet the sustenance,

sweet the ancient sadness, at least for the few hours it slips between my hands.

Touch it to my cheek;

wind it in my lap like flowers;

let me braid it, to soften my pain,

to magnify the light with it, now that it is dying.

When I am with God someday, I do not want an angel’s wing

to cool my heart’s bruises;

I want, stretches against the sky, the hair of the children I loved,

to let it blow in the wind against my face eternally!

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Gabriela Mistral [Lucila Godoy Alcayaga] (1889 – 1957) Chile

winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature

Translated by Skyler Isabella Gomez

Source: Literary Ladies Guide