Bread



They  left a bread on the table,
half burned, half white,
picked at on top and open
in some crumbs of snow.

It seems new to me or it is unseen
and still he hasn’t fed me,
but I turn over his crumb, sleepwalking,
touch and odor that I had forgotten.

It smells of my mother when she gave her milk,
smells of three valleys that I have passed over:
Aconcagua, Patzcuaro, Elqui,
and my entrails when I sing.

There are no other odors in the living room
and for this he has called me;
and there’s no one in the house at all
except this open bread on a plate,
that with his body he recognized me
and with mine I recognized him.

He has eaten in all climates
the same bread of a hundred brothers:
bread of Coquimbo, bread of Oaxaca,
bread of Santa Ana and of Santiago.

In my childhood I knew him
form of the sun, of fish or of halo,
and I knew my hand its crumb
and the heat of the feathered pigeon . . .

Later I forgot him, until that day
when we came to see each other again,
me with my body of old Sara
and he with his of five years.

Friends dead with whom I ate
in other valleys, feel the steam
of a milled bread in September
and in August the reaping of Castilla.

It’s someone else and its with him we ate
in the earth where they were laid to bed.
I open the crumb and I give them their heat;
I turn them around and I affix their breath.

His hand that I hold overflowing
and the glance pressed into my hand;
I submit a penitent cry
for the forgetting of so many years,
and my face ages
or I am reborn in this discovery.

As the house is found empty,
we are together the freshly encountered,
on this table without flesh or fruit,
the two of us in this human silence,
until we might be one
and our day may be fulfilled . . .

Gabriela Mistral