«To the foot, from its child»

The child’s foot doesn’t
yet know that it’s a foot — it
would like to be a

butterfly, or an
apple — But along come stones
and bits of glass, streets

and stairways, roads of
hard-packed earth to show the foot
that it can’t fly, can’t

be a rounded fruit
on the branch of a tree — which
is how the foot came

to be defeated,
a prisoner fallen in
battle, condemned to

live inside a shoe —
Slowly, slowly, it got to
know the world in its

own way, without light,
without ever meeting the
other foot, closed in,

exploring life like
someone blind — Those soft nails of
quartz, of clusters of

grapes, became hardened
and turned opaque, as tough as
horns, and the little

petals of the child’s
toes were crushed together and
thrown off balance, took

the shape of eyeless
reptiles, the three-sided heads
of worms, calloused and

covered over with
tiny volcanoes of death,
unacceptably

hard — But this blind one
kept on walking without rest,
hour by hour, one foot

then the other, now
a man’s foot, now a woman’s,
up and down, across

the fields, into mines
and markets and ministries,
backwards, forwards, in

and out, this foot worked
in its shoe, scarcely having
time to be naked

in love or sleep, it
walked, they walked, until the whole
person came to a

stop — It descended
then into the earth and knew
nothing about it,

because everything,
everything there was dark — stayed
unaware that it

had even ceased to
be a foot, or whether they
were burying it

so that it could fly
now, or so that it could turn
into an apple

© Pablo Neruda
© Translation Den Bellm