Hello, kind readers. We have entered the month of love and friendship, so I have proposed to write some articles this week on this subject, but work from various perspectives. For this I have taken several poems that will serve me to exemplify how it feels and how we see love in each of the ages or stages of our life.

Today I wanted to talk about child love. About how we live love in our childhood, about how it feels to fall in love for the first time. In this love there are colors, sweet words, naivety, innocence. The stories of childhood loves remain there, motionless, in a small box that opens when the sky is cloudy or life leaves you empty-handed. No matter how many years pass, the love we live when we are children is remembered with a smile, never with sadness. I would like us to open that box that keeps the loves of our childhood. Let us begin:

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I would like to begin with the poem Cuando pasas by the Colombian writer Jairo Aníbal Niño, which has been characterized by writing poems that remember our childhood and adolescence. I transcribe the entire poem:

When you pass,
a notebook falls off,
a foot stumbles,
the glasses slip,
his throat tightens,
a pair of sweaty hands,
he misses a scarf.

What happens
is that the notebook,
the foot,
glasses,
the throat,
the pair of hands
and the scarf
they're crazy about you.

The lyrical voice shows a frankness and sincerity that only children can have. In the first stanza of this poem the poetic voice speaks of what happens when it watches the person it loves pass by. We see that objects fall, break, but we also see that the hands sweat and that the throat closes, unequivocal signs of the state of nervousness of those who look. But if the first stanza shows us the behavior of the lover, in the second we see that he seeks to excuse that behavior with an unusual justification and hence the beauty of the poem: all objects are in love with the person who passes by. The fact of accepting, without any cover, everything that happens to us when we look at the loved one, is a brave and intense act, but it can create insecurity, hence the idea of blaming objects, inanimate beings who do not suffer from pain or rejection. It must be said that children do not express falling in love in the same way, but almost always they all take out their heart and carry it in their hands.

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Another poet who has cultivated children's literature and who has captured the naivety of the children's gaze in her poetry is the Spanish writer Gloria Fuertes. Here is a poem as an example:

In the tree of my chest
there's a bird incarnate.
When I see you, it gets scared,
flutters, jumps.
On the tree of my chest
there's a bird incarnate.
When I see you, it gets scared,
You're a scarecrow!

This poem uses metaphor to express the feelings we have when we see the loved one. It talks about a bird that flutters full of life, that jumps and sings inside the chest each time it looks at the other. We know that the bird in the chest is the frantic beating, the unbridled heart, the accelerated pulsations. As in the previous poem, the lyrical speaker speaks frankly, without cowardice, of the reactions we feel when we are in love, but in the end turns the confession towards humour, a known way of hiding ourselves, of taking away the burden of the moment. In these two poems we can see the same formula: the confession of love; then the cowardice of not knowing what to do with what was said, with what is felt, undeniable behavior of a childish and inexperienced character.

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Finally, I would like you to read the poem called Enamorados, by the Brazilian writer Manuel Bandeira, who has been known for writing about tenderness. I leave here a sample of his work and the subject we are dealing with:
The boy approached the girl and said:

-Antonia, I'm still not used to your body, to your face.
The girl looked sideways and waited.
-You know, when you're a chamito and suddenly you see a striped caterpillar?
The girl remembered:
-One stares...
Childhood toyed again in his eyes
The boy went on with a lot of sweetness:
-Antonia, you look like a striped caterpillar.
The girl opened her eyes wide, he exclaimed.
The boy concluded:
-Antonia, you're beautiful. You look crazy.

This beautiful poem contains the inability to express ourselves before the person we like, the shyness that can surpass us and the paralysis that we feel before the other. Sometimes we manage to get closer, but after that moment, the words get stuck, we don't know what to say and if we say something, it may not be the right thing to say or it's not what we really want to say. In this poem we see that there are two characters: a boy and a girl. The boy approaches the girl and tries to tell her how he feels about her, but he can't order his thoughts and what he says doesn't seem to make sense, or at least not the best. When he looks at the girl he exemplifies that observation with a childish memory: looking at a striped caterpillar. He starts from the idea of not getting used to the girl's body and face, so we understand that he talks about the wonderful transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. That last verse is the declaration of love and the attraction it feels, but it also uses, as in the previous poems, an exit mechanism for confession: "You look crazy". Strangely enough, these words, more than seeming to be an offense, give us an idea of the gaze of the lover and how delirious the other is.

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Childhood gives us the surprise of seeing some things for the first time, of feeling them, of living them, but unfortunately childhood is not eternal. People lose a certain naivety, innocence with time and experience. Each age narrates wonderful moments. But there are loves that taste of chocolate, ice cream, first kiss, all the beautiful things in life.

Maybe in many years we will forget the lyrics of our favorite song, the name of some friends we no longer see, the address of a house visited, the date of an important moment, but we will never forget our first love, the one that made our heart a balloon of colors, that made our cheeks turn pink with sorrow, that made our hands sweat and to whom we wrote letters and poems.

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I hope this reading has reminded you of your first love. Also remember to vote for @adsactly as a witness and visit our server in discord. Until the next smile;)

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

http://jairoanibalninopoemas.blogspot.com/2015/09/cuando-pasas.html
https://culturainquieta.com/es/inspiring/item/10222-10-poemas-de-gloria-fuertes-la-poeta-de-corazon-inmenso.html
https://poemasamoryamistad.com/manuel-bandeira

Written by: @nancybriti

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