translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original. - Marjorie Agosín

Though women have always been close to words, they have often been barred from speaking: Saint Paul, in the Holy Scriptures, ordered women to be silent in church, thus censuring their means of public expression. Numerous cultural maxims that attempt to predispose women to remain silent have been internalized by the female psyche, e.g., "En boca cerrada no entran moscas." ("No flies will enter a closed mouth.") Yet women have continued speaking their minds, often through the sacred language of poetry, where there is an abundance of intuition and the possibility of reclaiming power through language.

Writing is bewitching, like a song or cadence. I arrive at words the way one arrives at spells. Poetry is a story that attaches itself to my feet, my being. Sometimes I will lie down on the earth, invent poems about lost love and fear. Writing is a form of love, of loving and being loved. These aren't words, syllables, or useless alphabets launched by chance or an obsession with speech. Each word wants its own freedom to transform reality into wonder, to create another story, to uncover longings, happiness, the astonishing world between the pen and the shattered paper, limber and fragile. Writing is a way to truth, to telling the truth and tieing it to books, to stone walls.

I think that too many people are thrown into history, but remain accomplices, which means [they] are silent. I think what I like to say, and this is something I am the most proud of, that I made the choice to become a witness of those times. I made an absolutely conscious choice that I was going to be that, and I continue to look at the world with the same passion and commitment for social justice as when I was 17 years old, and sometimes people cannot believe it. They think I am this crazy idealist, but I am the same, even more now.