Thorns and the route they take

SAGUAROS 


They look battered and friction-worn, although

they never go

anywhere, but stand for a century or two

as if playing statue 

out in the humorless sun

and the cold-faced moon. Their fun

is sombre fun, clumsy fun, without a word.

The hummingbird 

and the cactus wren

inhabit their thorny mockery of men,

each miming gesture

slightly unprecedented in Nature.

Their melancholy individuality

spells death to me;
their skeletons outlast their flesh, as with us,                               

        and as in many a howling congregation

        their arms lift up in surrender or supplication.

Mute mobs of them throng the desert dusk. 

                                                              —John Updike

Night Thistle

The Girls' College 

Yesterday I was invited by Mark Slonim (the most famous expert on Russian literature in America, and he also teaches Italian: I had met him in Rome) to ... where he teaches comparative literature. [It] is a very chic girls' college, where each girl chooses the course she wants, there are no lectures just discussions, no exams, in short everyone has a great time dealing with pleasant and varied cultural topics. Girls in trousers and big socks and multicolored jerseys, just like in films about college life, flutter down from the buildings where they have their faculty rooms and dormitories. Lunch is very meagre because in any case the girls want to keep their figure (while the starving tutors protest). ... I read, translate and give a commentary on St Francis to the various Beths, Virginias, Joans. And since their teacher has dropped a timid hint that she prefers D'Annunzio, I rebel and produce a lengthy eulogy putting St Francis above all other poets. I realize that this is the first time since coming to America that I have explained anything or defended an idea. And it had to be St Francis. Very appropriate (41-42). 

The Stranger (La Extranjera)


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.             -Gabriela Mistral