Orange
April 30 2014


The loose soil
in the dry heat
gave it up easily,
plucked from my weed-infested garden.

It seemed to be shivering
in its thin orange skin,
stripped of sun-warmed earth
flecked with dirt
gripped
by its tough tousled greenery.

Do vegetables scream
when harvested?
Because they are still alive, if unselfconscious,
sending out
chemical calls of distress,
to which we are blind and deaf
dumb as rocks.

Tiny rootlets
along its length
are translucent white.
Almost embryonic
in their exposed state,
too naked, delicate
for air's cool dryness
day's harsh light.

We will say grace
to no god, in particular,
looking down at the table
mumbling under our breath.
Recognize that life and death
go hand-in-hand,
and that gratitude
is the greatest reverence.

It was sweet, fat, fresh,
an act of creation
of soil, sun, rain.
The carrot I didn't tend
but grew, anyway.

It looks as if the "colour" series continues. Which is extremely helpful, finding myself in the mood to write, but short of subjects in my uneventful life.

Here I shameless personify a vegetable. Especially the 4th stanza, which evokes for me a fetus, as well as the moment of birth. There are allusions to lots of deeper things; but to me, the most important message is the one about gratitude. Otherwise, I think the poem is a celebration of life: its irrepressible fecundity, basic commonality, and cruel struggle. And, as usual, I'm always attracted to poems of close observation: the smaller and more diurnal the subject, the better.

But I have to admit that what most pleases me is having found a word that resonates with "orange", reputedly impossible to rhyme. (Which, in case you think slightly sideways rhymes don't count, is "warmed".)
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