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 toenails
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.

Pablo Neruda, translated by Jodey Bateman

Looking at the first stanza … this is all about growing up … accepting who we are and not what we would like to be … in life perhaps … and with time we become molded by the constraints of who we are … eventually fitting into life after the repeated exercise of experience … but do we become defeated when we can’t be something different …

Then the sorry tell of a forced existence … a forced way of life being led this way and that way … over the rough ground … and hopefully some smooth ground too … it became hardened nailed to life – if you excuse the pun … it became toughened to life … perhaps that is what happens all the time with the body that suffers the consequences of living … I won’t mention the state of my left knee which is yelling at me at the moment to be something different

In the second stanza there is another side to the situation … a brother if you like who has been through the same restrictive experiential existence … and has had to adapt too … was this brother more accepting … who knows? … but it is always nice having someone close by all the time to keep you in balance … and there is reciprocate behavior …so that in unison ground is covered so to speak … but perhaps the brother foot led the way and forced the child foot into following … partnership can be one sided …

In the end the foot had to come to rest … what was it like at the end of the journey … and what was the end … it was returned to what it might become … a touch of reincarnation … or perhaps an unknown spiritual afterlife … so many people die wishing to be blessed with something better … sadly, in the past Church congregations paid money with that thought in mind … not too mention terrorists who hoped to be rewarded after performing ugly violent acts.

Looking at the structure. This poem is an example of an unusual extended personal personification of how part of a body evolves in a life-time … it is up to the reader to extend the thought into how we adapt to experience and how we try to cope if we cannot be what we want to be … how we accept who we are under the circumstances of our existence … and how we work together in unison with the body of life … and whether we are connected to a soul-mate to lead us

Here is another poem that follows on from the last stanza. Albeit a gentle welcoming ending to life. A classic example of extended personification – Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me —”

In this poem, Death is personified as a polite, gentle gentleman who arrives in a carriage and takes the speaker on a journey. Instead of being something frightening or abstract, Death behaves like a courteous companion. Death “kindly” stops and drives a carriage. It transforms fear of death into something calm and reflective. The entire poem continues this personification metaphor, making it richer and more meaningful.