Sunday, August 13, 2006
An Onion Bouquet
Real life has intervened and kept me from making new entries the last couple of months; that's likely to continue to some extent for at least another couple of months, although I hope to make at least an occasional post. Today's post differs in that it's not the work of a single writer (I will be getting back to that in a while) but a group of poems related by subject: the onion .
"Ode to the Onion"
by Pablo Neruda
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicated the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion,
clear as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
Generously
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent consummation
of the cooking pot,
and the crystal shred
in the flaming heat of the oil
is transformed into a curled golden feather.
Then, too, I will recall how fertile
is your influence on the love of the salad,
and it seem that the sky contributes
by giving you the shape of hailstones
to celebrate your chopped brightness
on the hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the hands of the common people,
sprinkled with oil,
dusted
with a bit of salt,
you kill the hunger
of the day-laborer on his hard path.
Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate
paper, you rise from the ground
eternal, whole, pure
like an astral seed,
and when the kitchen knife
cuts you, there arises
the only tear
without sorrow.
You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
you are to my eyes
a heavenly globe, a platinum goblet,
an unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
***
"Valentine"
by
Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
***
"The Traveling Onion"
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
"It is believed the onion originally came
from India. In egypt it was an object of worship --
why I haven't been able to find out. From egypt
the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence
into all of Europe."
--Better Living Cookbook
When I think how far the onion has travleed
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
And I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.
***
"Song to Onions"
by
Roy Blount, Jr.
They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion's a group.
Peel back the skin, delve into tissue
And see how an onion has been blessed with issue.
Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you've got three then you find you've got fovum.
Onion on on-
Ion on onion they run,
Each but the smallest one some onion's mother:
An onion comprises a half-dozen other.
In sum then an onion you could say is less
Than the sumof its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess --
In food and in the arts.
Things pungent, not tony.
I'll take damon Runyon
Over Antonioni --
Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion.
I'm anti-baloney.
Although a baloney sandwish would
Right now, with onions, be right good.
And so would sliced onions
--Chewed with cheese,
Or onions chopped and sprinkled
--Over black-eyed peas:
Black-eyed,
--grey-gravied
----absorbent of essences
------eaten on New Year's Eve
--------peas.
***
"The Onion"
by
Margaret Gibson
Mornings when sky is white as dried gristle
and the air's unhealthy, coast
smothered, and you gone
-- I could stay in bed
and be the woman who aches for no reason, each day
a small death of love, cold rage for dinner,
coffee and continental indifference
at dawn.
-- Or dream lazily a market day --
bins of fruit and celery, poultry strung up,
loops of garlic and peppers. I'd select one
yellow onion, fist-sized, test its sleek
hardness, haggle and settle a fair price.
Yesterday, a long day measured by shovel
and mattock, a wrestle with roots --
calm and dizzy when I bent over to loosen my shoes
at the finish -- I thought
--if there were splendors,
what few there were, knowledge of them
in me like fire in flint,
I would have them . . .
--and now I'd say the onion,
I'd have that, too. The work it took,
the soup it flavors, the griefs
it innocently summons.
***
"Onions"
by
William Matthews
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
"chatni," to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It's true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there's nothing to an onion
but skin, and it's true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and age and murmury animal
comfort thaty infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-wshed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It's there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
***
"Peeling Onions"
by
Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There's not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Crying was labour, once
when I'd good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog's look, a cat's, burnt to my brain --
yet all that stayed
stuff in my lungs like smog.
These old tears in the chopping-bowl.
***
"The Onion"
by
Wislawa Szymborska
The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its tip to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undimished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature's roundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
***
"Onions"
by
Lorna Crozier
The onion loves the onion.
It hugs its many layers,
saying, O, O, O,
each vowel smaller
than the last.
Some say it has no heart.
It surrounds itself,
feels whole. Primordial.
First among vegetables.
If Eve had bitten it
instead of the apple,
how different
Paradise.
"Ode to the Onion"
by Pablo Neruda
Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicated the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion,
clear as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
Generously
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent consummation
of the cooking pot,
and the crystal shred
in the flaming heat of the oil
is transformed into a curled golden feather.
Then, too, I will recall how fertile
is your influence on the love of the salad,
and it seem that the sky contributes
by giving you the shape of hailstones
to celebrate your chopped brightness
on the hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the hands of the common people,
sprinkled with oil,
dusted
with a bit of salt,
you kill the hunger
of the day-laborer on his hard path.
Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate
paper, you rise from the ground
eternal, whole, pure
like an astral seed,
and when the kitchen knife
cuts you, there arises
the only tear
without sorrow.
You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
you are to my eyes
a heavenly globe, a platinum goblet,
an unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
***
"Valentine"
by
Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
***
"The Traveling Onion"
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
"It is believed the onion originally came
from India. In egypt it was an object of worship --
why I haven't been able to find out. From egypt
the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence
into all of Europe."
--Better Living Cookbook
When I think how far the onion has travleed
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
And I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.
***
"Song to Onions"
by
Roy Blount, Jr.
They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion's a group.
Peel back the skin, delve into tissue
And see how an onion has been blessed with issue.
Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you've got three then you find you've got fovum.
Onion on on-
Ion on onion they run,
Each but the smallest one some onion's mother:
An onion comprises a half-dozen other.
In sum then an onion you could say is less
Than the sumof its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess --
In food and in the arts.
Things pungent, not tony.
I'll take damon Runyon
Over Antonioni --
Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion.
I'm anti-baloney.
Although a baloney sandwish would
Right now, with onions, be right good.
And so would sliced onions
--Chewed with cheese,
Or onions chopped and sprinkled
--Over black-eyed peas:
Black-eyed,
--grey-gravied
----absorbent of essences
------eaten on New Year's Eve
--------peas.
***
"The Onion"
by
Margaret Gibson
Mornings when sky is white as dried gristle
and the air's unhealthy, coast
smothered, and you gone
-- I could stay in bed
and be the woman who aches for no reason, each day
a small death of love, cold rage for dinner,
coffee and continental indifference
at dawn.
-- Or dream lazily a market day --
bins of fruit and celery, poultry strung up,
loops of garlic and peppers. I'd select one
yellow onion, fist-sized, test its sleek
hardness, haggle and settle a fair price.
Yesterday, a long day measured by shovel
and mattock, a wrestle with roots --
calm and dizzy when I bent over to loosen my shoes
at the finish -- I thought
--if there were splendors,
what few there were, knowledge of them
in me like fire in flint,
I would have them . . .
--and now I'd say the onion,
I'd have that, too. The work it took,
the soup it flavors, the griefs
it innocently summons.
***
"Onions"
by
William Matthews
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
"chatni," to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It's true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there's nothing to an onion
but skin, and it's true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and age and murmury animal
comfort thaty infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-wshed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It's there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
***
"Peeling Onions"
by
Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There's not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Crying was labour, once
when I'd good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog's look, a cat's, burnt to my brain --
yet all that stayed
stuff in my lungs like smog.
These old tears in the chopping-bowl.
***
"The Onion"
by
Wislawa Szymborska
The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its tip to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undimished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature's roundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
***
"Onions"
by
Lorna Crozier
The onion loves the onion.
It hugs its many layers,
saying, O, O, O,
each vowel smaller
than the last.
Some say it has no heart.
It surrounds itself,
feels whole. Primordial.
First among vegetables.
If Eve had bitten it
instead of the apple,
how different
Paradise.
# posted by Hedgie @ 9:16 PM 
