Gabriela Mistral
1889-1957 20th century
Tenderness for those who are not one's own, and each day's work carried in prayer.
Who was Gabriela Mistral?
A village schoolteacher in a valley of northern Chile, she taught before she was a poet and remained one all her life. Marked young by a bereavement, she wrote about children, the land, and the tenderness she carried for children who were not her own. The first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, she left prayers written for her own trade.
In their own words
You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God upon the universe.
Master, make my fervour lasting and my disappointment brief.
Grant me to be more mother than mothers, so as to love and defend as they do what is not flesh of my flesh.