The Stranger (La Extranjera) – Gabriela Mistral

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

Amar A La Extranjera – Juvenal Acosta

Loving The Stranger (or Foreigner)

Those things
I felt for you in Spanish
and talked about in English
with my therapist,
my cat,
and the inhabitants of this Tower of Babel, I just
cannot bring myself to repeat them
anymore,
in the language I use on the daily, daily basis
to get jobs, tobacco and cappuccinos.

Inside my tongue
there is a foreign blood
and inside that blood there is still
another foreign blood.
– I must say I go from blood to blood
like an international vampire –
Why ask why?
I won’t ask anymore questions.
I’m fed up with getting answers.
I won’t repeat myself in circles of damn pain.
My traveling heart
is learning everything there is to know
about foreign towns,
foreign tongues,
and silence.

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