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The Puerto Rican Literature Project The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Devote Little Old Ladies (trans.)

Arturo Gómez Costa

Translated from the Spanish by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

1918

     Those devote little old ladies, who slowly unravel the fragile thread of their lives while they pray naively with the rosary of gray griefs, have for me a religious and humble veneration. They scented us with the white dreams of childhood and its lullabies; they give us the flowers of their advice from the retreat of their homes. How often we were lulled to sleep, back in the beloved distances of childhood, as we stripped our heliotropes of blue stories, of adorable stories that still remain in our collective soul, like the perfume and charm of the adolescent who brought us, perhaps forever, the daisy of our first love! I have seen them, with the early smiles of dawn, carrying a prayer book with yellowed pages that exhale an ineffable aroma of piety. Dressed in black, these little old ladies slowly enter the church, the noble and good church in whose fragrant peace as a child I glimpsed my first reveries of melancholy...

Rights: Public domain

Viejecitas devotas

Arturo Gómez Costa

1918

Esas viejecitas devotas, que van destejiendo el hilo frágil 

de su vida mientras rezan ingenuamente con el rosario de las

tristezas grises, tienen para mí una veneración religiosa y 

humilde. Ellas nos aromaron los albos sueños de la niñez

con sus canciones de cuna; ellas nos dan las flores de sus 

consejos en el retiro del hogar. ¡Cuántas veces fuimos

arrullados y adormecidos, allá en las queridas lejanías

de la infancia, al deshojarnos los heliotropos de cuentos

azules, de cuentos adorables que perduran aún en 

nuestra alma, como el perfume y el encanto de la

adolescente que nos llevó, quizás para siempre, 

la margarita de nuestro primer amor! Yo las he visto,

a las tempraneras sonrisas del alba, llevando consigo

un devocionario de páginas amarillentas que exhalan

un inefable aroma de piedad.Vestidas de negro estas 

viejecitas entra pausadamente a la iglesia, la iglesia noble

y buena en cuya paz olorosa vislumbré de niño mis primeros

ensueños de melancolía…

Rights: Public domain