Thursday 8 September 2011

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
duplicating 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.

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,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

2 comments:

  1. so much to say about an Onion, quite interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ONE DAY I WILL MAKE THE ONION CRY, RAWR! But yeah, there are those that say that when you have writer's block you should try writing about unusual subjects (such as a wall, apparently o.o"), and I'd say an onion is definitely a weird subject matter. Almost as weird as writing about a dictionary...(see Ode To The Dictionary by Neruda)

    ReplyDelete