To-day's quote

"If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people."

Harvey Mackay

To wash a child

The following is, in a sense, a double theft. Indeed, I will be using a poem by Pablo Neruda. A poem I recently found on Ana Johnson's great website: www.yummymummymanifesto.com.
I can't resist, however, it's such a beautiful poem. Last Friday I saw my friend and colleague Madeleine who works as a conference interpreter and translator and who recently became a mother. She showed me wonderful pictures of her son Xavier, one of them in a bath. It triggered powerful memories of the slippery body of my son Thomas when I bathed him, quite a long while ago now. As another friend and colleague, Karin, said 'bathing a child appeals to something very primitive and meaningful within a woman's heart'. Anyhow, there is no chance in hell I will ever be able to express these things the way Pablo Neruda did, so I will let him do the 'talking' for now:

TO WASH A CHILD
by Pablo Neruda
Only the most ancient love on earth
will wash and comb the statue of the children,
straighten the feet and knees.
The water rises, the soap slithers,
and the pure body comes up to breathe
the air of flowers and motherhood.
Oh, the sharp watchfulness,
the sweet deception,
the lukewarm struggle!
Now the hair is a tangled
pelt criscrossed by charcoal,
by sawdust and oil,
soot, wiring, crabs,
until love, in its patience,
sets up buckets and sponges,
combs and towels,
and, out of scrubbing and combing, amber,
primal scrupulousness, jasmines,
has emerged the child, newer still,
running from the mother’s arms
to clamber again on its cyclone,
go looking for mud, oil, urine and ink,
hurt itself, roll about on the stones.
Thurs, newly washed, the child springs into life,
for later, it will have time for nothing more
than keeping clean, but with the life lacking.