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January 08, 2008

Tuesday Poem

From NoUtopia:

A Lemon
Pablo Neruda

Screenhunter_5From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
Screenhunter_6its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.

So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
Screenhunter_7a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth's breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 07:19 AM | Permalink

Comments

Excellent selection of graphics Abbas, right down to "a fragrant nipple
of the earth's breast"

The post glows with lemon!

Posted by: Jim | Jan 8, 2008 12:13:28 PM

Thanks, Jim! I have some fun doing this with the poems you send me, even though it's quite silly, I suppose!

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jan 8, 2008 12:36:04 PM

I'll never take a lemon for granted again.

Posted by: Nikolai Nikola | Jan 8, 2008 2:07:30 PM

Nikolai,

Impressive what Pablo can do with a lemon, isn't it? He's good at tomatoes too.

And Abbas, what's so silly about putting your best aesthetic foot forward? It's one of the things that makes life worth living.

Posted by: Jim | Jan 8, 2008 3:17:51 PM

Jim, I hate tomatoes.

does he do artichokes?

Posted by: Nikolai Nikola | Jan 8, 2008 6:10:09 PM

Absolutely, Nikolai. Call Pablo the vegetarian poet.

Here, with an eye tuned to the real, he extolls the artichoke. He says:

The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable,
By its side
The crazy vegetables
Uncurled
Their tendrills and leaf-crowns,
Throbbing bulbs,
In the sub-soil
The carrot
With its red mustaches
Was sleeping,
The grapevine
Hung out to dry its branches
Through which the wine will rise,
The cabbage
Dedicated itself
To trying on skirts,
The oregano
To perfuming the world,
And the sweet
Artichoke
There in the garden,
Dressed like a warrior,
Burnished
Like a proud
Pomegrante.
And one day
Side by side
In big wicker baskets
Walking through the market
To realize their dream
The artichoke army
In formation.
Never was it so military
Like on parade.
The men
In their white shirts
Among the vegetables
Were
The Marshals
Of the artichokes
Lines in close order
Command voices,
And the bang
Of a falling box.

But
Then
Maria
Comes
With her basket
She chooses
An artichoke,
She's not afraid of it.
She examines it, she observes it
Up against the light like it was an egg,
She buys it,
She mixes it up
In her handbag
With a pair of shoes
With a cabbage head and a
Bottle
Of vinegar
Until
She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.

Posted by: Jim | Jan 8, 2008 7:04:36 PM

Beautiful visuals of lemons! I prefer the following rendering of this Neruda poem by Ben Belitt.

A Lemon

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium.

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it--
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little
cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Posted by: Steve Haines | Jan 9, 2008 11:10:14 AM

Very pretty poems. I would love to have them arranged with original art, then framed and hung in my kitchen.

Posted by: ghostman | Jan 9, 2008 3:52:23 PM

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