Al Pie Desde Su Nino

Travis will appreciate this one, and I'll post the translation as well. I just really like this poem. It reminds me a lot of that passage in scripture that talks about Christians as different parts of the body. It is easy to be jealous of other parts of the body. I can relate with the foot in this poem, sometimes I also wish I were an apple or a butterfly. I have my thoughts, interpretations, and opinions of this poem, but it is probably better to let it speak for itself.

El pie del niño aún no sabe que es pie,
y quiere ser mariposa o manzana.

Pero luego los vidrios y las piedras,
las calles, las escaleras,
y los caminos de la tierra dura
van enseñando al pie que no puede volar,
que no puede ser fruto redondo en una rama.
El pie del niño entonces
fue derrotado, cayó
en la batalla,
fue prisionero,
condenado a vivir en un zapato.

Poco a poco sin luz
fue conociendo el mundo a su manera,
sin conocer el otro pie, encerrado,
explorando la vida como un ciego.

Aquellas suaves uñas
de cuarzo, de racimo,
se endurecieron, se mudaron
en opaca substancia, en cuerno duro,
y los pequeños pétalos del niño
se aplastaron, se desequilibraron,
tomaron formas de reptil sin ojos,
cabezas triangulares de gusano.
Y luego encallecieron,
se cubrieron
con mínimos volcanes de la muerte,
inaceptables endurecimientos.

Pero este ciego anduvo
sin tregua, sin parar
hora tras hora,
el pie y el otro pie,
ahora de hombre
o de mujer,
arriba,
abajo,
por los campos, las minas,
los almacenes y los ministerios,
atrás,
afuera, adentro,
adelante,
este pie trabajó con su zapato,
apenas tuvo tiempo
de estar desnudo en el amor o el sueño,
caminó, caminaron
hasta que el hombre entero se detuvo.

Y entonces a la tierra
bajó y no supo nada,
porque allí todo y todo estaba oscuro,
no supo que había dejado de ser pie,
si lo enterraban para que volara
o para que pudiera
ser manzana.

To the Foot from it's Child

The child's foot still doesn't know it's a foot,
it wants to be a butterfly or apple.

Later, the stones, bits and pieces of glass,
streets, stairways,
the packed earth of the road,
go on teaching the foot it can't fly,
can't be round as fruit on a branch.
The child's foot,
defeated, went down
in battle,
a casualty
condemned to live in a shoe.

Little by little in the dark it began
to interpret the world after its fashion,
never knowing its other foot, still enclosed,
groping for life like a blind man.

Those toe-nails, glossy
as quartz, in a cluster,
hardened over, assumed
matter's opacity; tough as horn,
the child's little petals
flattened out, shifted their balance,
took the eyeless form of a reptile,
the triangular head of a worm.
They grew calluses,
covered themselves
with death's littlest volcanoes,
unwanted fossilization.

But the blind thing trudged on
without stopping or flinching,
hour after hour,
one foot after the other foot,
now a man's,
now a woman's,
above
or below,
crossing meadows and mines,
warehouses, offices -
forward and
back, inside
or ahead of itself,
the foot worked with its shoe,
hardly had time
to strip down for loving or sleeping,
it walked, they kept walking,
till the whole man dropped in his tracks.

Then it crawled
under the earth and knew nothing more,
since all things, all possible things, are shadowy there.
It never knew it had stopped being a foot - whether
they had buried it to teach it to fly,
or because one day it might
turn into an apple.

by Pablo Neruda