Speaking of Gabriel - Rosario Castellanos

Like all visitors my son disturbed me,

taking a place that was my place,

existing unpropitiously,

making me divide every mouthful in two.

Ugly, sick, bored,

I felt him grow at my expense,

steal his color from my blood, add

a weight and a secret breadth

to my own way of being on the earth.

His body begged me to be born, to cede him the way,

to give him a place in the world,

the quota of time essential for his history.

I consented. And when he came through that wound, through that

hemorrhage of dislodgment,

there departed as well the last I had

of solitude, of gazing out from behind a window.

I was left open, receptive

to visitations, to the wind, to presence.

---

Rosario Castellanos (1925 - 1974) Mexico

Translated by Kate Flores

Source: Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two

[See also: Hispanic feminist poems from the Middle Ages to the present: a bilingual anthology, by Kate Flores, Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1986]