Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Meditation: On Fire



3 comments:

  1. Do you know the Pablo Naruda poem "ode to an onion?" I think you captured it in a photograph... these are lovely!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Onion,
    luminous flask,
    your beauty formed
    petal by petal,
    crystal scales expanded you
    and in the secrecy of the dark earth
    you belly grew round with dew.
    Under the earth
    the miracle
    happened
    and when your clumsy
    green stem apppeared,
    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 every thing 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And so have you inspired and provoked mad love here in this most glorious space.

    XXXOO

    ReplyDelete