On Becoming an Apple

She’s done it! Deee has started a blog! She’s probably going to hate me for putting her link on here given that it is private musings probably intended for close friends and family and everything, but I’m not the type of person you want to tell private or secret things to, and she knows this, so I’m going to proceed with reckless, sharing abandon and tell her to eff off if she has a problem with it.

That said, her blog is lovely. Really and truly lovely. Pablo-Neruda-lovely, private-musings lovely, how-to-roast-chestnuts-lovely. All of these things are Deee, and all of these things are the reasons that she’s my best friend and I adore her.

Plus I took her profile picture and I want everybody here to know that I’m RIDICULOUSLY good at portraiture.

On Becoming an Apple:

To the Foot from Its Child, by Pablo Neruda

The child's foot doesn't know yet that it's a foot,
and wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

But then stones and pieces of glass,
streets, ladders,
and the paths of the hard earth
go on teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be round fruit on a branch.
The child's foot then
was overcome, it fell
in the battle,
was a prisoner,
condemned to live in a shoe.

Gradually, without light,
it started to know the world in its own way,
without knowing the other foot, shut in,
exploring life like a blindman.

These soft nails
of quartz, in a bunch,
hardened, changed into
opaque matter, into hard horn,
and the small petals of the child
got crushed, unbalanced,
took the form of eyeless reptiles,
worms' triangular heads.
And then they grew calluses,
they were covered
with tiny volcanoes
of death, unacceptable
hardenings.

But this blind thing walked
without respite, without stopping
hour after hour,
one foot and then the other,
now a man's
or a woman's,
above,
below,
through fields, through mines,
through department stores and ministries,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot laboured with its shoe,
it hardly took time
to be naked in love or in sleep,
it walked, they walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and knew nothing,
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know that it had ceased being a foot,
if they had buried it so that it could fly
or so that it could
become an apple.