Today’s post is in honour of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, whose bones have been exhumed to determine whether he was murdered by the Pinochet regime. May they tell the truth, as his poetry did. It’s extraordinary to think that he was also a diplomat and politician – the emotional honesty and integrity of his work would seem to preclude the cynicism of the latter profession, as exemplified by the current Coalition crew and its craven Labour opposition.
Here is one of my favourites, followed by a Spanish-language YouTube presentation using sock puppets, complete with bloopers at the end. I think he would have approved.
Ode To My Socks
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.Pablo Neruda
Filed under: Writing
