(Untitled)
i don't know what to say to you. i often feel that none of this has any point... unable to write, i... drift and drift. i don't know how to enjoy my consciousness, right now, without my paper journal as all-suffusing company. (because of my broken arm, you know.) i feel deadly lonesome. it's silly.
Ode to an Onion
Onion,
luminous phial,
petal by petal
your beauty was formed,
scales of crystal amassed
and dark earth in secrecy
rounded your belly of dew.
Beneath the earth
was the miracle
and when a clumsy green stalk
appeared,
and your leaves like swords in the garden
were born,
the earth gathered her might
in showing your naked transparency,
and as in Aphrodite the distant sea
replicated the magnolia
raising her breasts,
so the earth
made you,
onion,
bright as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
Generous,
you undo
your globe of coolness
in the fervent consummation
of the pot,
and the shred of crystal
at the ardent heat of oil
transforms into a curled feather of gold.
Also I will remember how your influence
quickens the love of the salad,
and it seems that the sky contributes
in giving you the fine form of hail
to celebrate your brightness minced
over the hemispheres of a tomato.
But at the pursuit
of the people's hands
sprinkled with oil,
dusted
with a little salt,
you kill the hunger
of the day-laborer on the hard road.
Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate
paper, you come from the earth,
eternal, intact, pure
as starseed,
and on cutting you
the knife in the kitchen
raises the single tear
without sorrow.
You made us weep without grieving us.
All that exists I celebrated, onion,
but to me you are
more beautiful than a bird
of blinding feathers,
you are to my eyes
a celestial globe, cup of platinum,
motionless dance
of anemone covered in snow
and the fragrance of earth
lives in your crystalline nature.
- Pablo Neruda,
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It helps.
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