Little Boy Lost by Pablo Neruda

Slow childhood, a long
pasture for grazing, out of which
grows the hard pistil,
the fiber and wood of the man.

But who was I? What? What were we both?

Nothing answers me now: let it pass.
Being never was once: we went on being. Other feet,
other hands, other eyes.
All things in their passing kept changing, like leaf after leaf
on a tree. And in you? Your skin changed,
your hair and your memory: you were never that other.
That was a child loping by at a run,
a boy on a bicycle on the opposite side of the river,
in whose motion
your whole life passed by in the stress of a moment.
The fraud of identity followed your footsteps.
Day in, day out, hours joined in their sequences,
but none of them held you forever; it was in that other
who came, that other you, biding his time till you went,
till you parted yourself
from that intimate bypasser,
from the wagons and trains of your life,
substitutions and wayfarers.


The child's mask kept changing,
his mournful occasions subsided,
he steadied his altering mastery:
his skeleton toughened,
the device of his bones was accomplished,
his smile,
his manner of walking, the fugitive gesture that echoed
the child running nakedly
out of a lightning flash--
all that growth was cloth for a garment:
haberdashery loaned to that other!

Yes, it was that way.

From a wilderness world
I came to the city: into gases, into barbarous
faces that measured my light to my stature;
women who sought part of themselves in myself
as though they had lost me there--
all kept on happening,
one man impurely persisting,
son of the purely born son,
till nothing remained as it was.
Little by little, the face of a stranger
looked out of my face--
though my face remained changelessly there.
It was I who was growing there,
I and yourself,
it was you growing there,
all of us one,
all growing and changing
till no one could say who we were.
Sometimes we remember
the presence that lived with us,
there is something we want from him--that he remember us,
   maybe,
or know, at least, we were he and now talk
with his tongue;
but there in the rubbish of hours
he looks at us, acknowledging nothing.

en español es muy bonita