Just for Fun - Poem: Ode to my Socks

From customer Minda J.: Here’s a poem about knit socks I found in a book called "10 Poems to Change Your Life". It is also in the book, "Ode to Common Things".

Ode to My Socks
by Pablo Neruda (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Maru Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted with her own
sheepherder hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as if they were
two cases knittted
with threads of
twilight and the pelt of sheep.

Outrageous socks,
my feet became two fish
made of wool,
two long sharks
of ultramarine blue
crossed by one golden hair,
two gigantic blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were
so beautiful
that for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen unworthy
of that embroidered fire,
of those luminous socks.

Nevertheless,
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them
as schoolboys keep fireflies,
as scholars collect
sacred documents,
I resisted
the wild impulse
to put them
in a golden cage
and each day give them birdseed
and chunks of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle
who hand over the rare
green deer
to the roasting spit
and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks
and then my shoes.

And the moral of my ode
is this:
beauty is twice
beauty and what is good is doubly
good when it's a matter of two
woolen socks in winter.