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.

poem by pablo neruda
translated by jodey bateman

-s.s.