May 4: Poet of the Week, Pablo Neruda, "A Lemon"

So, I just got home about an hour ago.  Unpacked the car.  Got my son to bed.  Submitted the grades for my poetry workshop.

I literally didn't think I was going to have the time to get one post done, let alone two.  And I didn't have any idea of who I was going to choose as Poet of the Week.  Well, I just decided.

Pablo Neruda has always been one of my favorite poets.  His odes are simply stunning. Any poet would sacrifice a limb to be able to write just one poem like Neruda.

Saint Marty isn't quite ready to lose a hand just yet.  Maybe a toenail.

A Lemon

by:  Pablo Neruda

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.  

 

When life gives you lemons...