The poet prays to the Virgin for help

I pray to the Divine Mother of God,
Heavenly Queen of all living things,
that she grant me the pure light of the little animals
that have a single letter in their vocabulary.
Animals without souls. Simple shapes.
Far from the cat's despicable knowledge.
Far from the owl's fictitious profundity.
Far from the horse's sculptural wisdom.
Creatures that love without eyes,
with a single sense of infinity's waves,
that gather in great piles
to be eaten by birds.
Grant me the single dimension
that little flat animals have
so that I can tell of things covered with earth
beneath the hard innocence of the shoe.
No one weeps because he understands
the millions of tiny deaths at the marketplace,
the Chinese multitude of headless onions,
and that great yellow sun of old, flattened fish.

You, Mother, forever to be feared. Whale of all the skies,
You, Mother, forever joking. Neighbour of the borrowed parsley.
You know that to speak of the world
I must understand its slightest flesh.


Federico Garcia Lorca

from Lecture: Poet in New York
(translated by Christopher Maurer)