poetry...

Every so often I need to read poetry. Poets are so in love with words. They have so much to teach us. One of my favourites is Pablo Neruda who writes originally in Spanish.
I love this... Do you have favourite poems? I'd love to hear.

Pablo Neruda's 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.

Translated by Jodey Bateman