Neruda
To the Foot From Its Child
A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple But then the rocks and pieces of glass, the streets, the stairways and the roads of hard earth keep teaching the foot that it can't fly, that it can't be a round fruit on a branch. Then the child's foot was defeated, it fell in battle, it was a prisoner, condemned to life in a shoe.
Little by little without light it got acquainted with the world in its own way without knowing the other imprisoned foot exploring life like a blind man.
Those smooth toe nails of quartz in a bunch, got harder, they changed into an opaque substance, into hard horn and the child's little petals were crushed, lost their balance, took the form of a reptile without eyes, with triangular heads like a worm's. And they had callused over, they were covered with tiny lava fields of death, a hardening unasked for. But this blind thing kept going without surrender, without stopping hour after hour. One foot after another, now as a man, or a woman, above, below, through the fields, the mines, the stores, the government bureaus, backward, outside, inside, forward, this foot worked with its shoes, it hardly had time to be naked in love or in sleep one foot walked, both feet walked until the whole man stopped.
And then it went down into the earth and didn't know anything because there everything was dark, it didn't know it was no longer a foot or if they buried it so it could fly or so it could be an apple.
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