I recently saw the Italian film Il Postino, a story of how a simple man's world opens up and changes upon meeting Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet. It is a film about friendship, love and poetry. I must confess that I am no fan of poetry and that I practically have zero knowledge on Neruda. Seeing how Neruda touched so many lives in the film, I did a little research on Neruda and I stumbled upon this.
I thought it is apt that I share this poem by Neruda, a perfect tribute to the fruit we love:
Ode to a Lemon by Pablo Neruda
From those lemon flowers
Set free
By the light of the moon
From that
Odor of a love
Frustrated,
Sunken in fragrance,
There came
From the Lemon tree its yellow,
From its planetary system
The lemons came down to the earth.
Tender merchandise!
Our shores filled up with it,
The markets
Of light, of gold
From a tree,
And we open up
The two halves
Of a miracle,
Congealed acid
Which ran
From the hemispheres
Of a star
And the most profound liquor
In nature,
Unchanging, alive,
Indestructible,
Born from the freshness
Of the lemon,
From its fragrant house,
From its acid, secret symmetry.
Inside the lemon the knives
Cut
A small
Cathedral,
The window hidden behind the altars
Opened to the light its glassy acids,
And in drops
Like topazes they were dripped
Onto the altars
By the architecture of freshness.
So when your hand
Squeezes the hemisphere
Of the cut
Lemon onto your plate,
A universe of gold,
You have poured out
One
Yellow cup
Full of miracles
One of the sweet-smelling nipples
Of the breast of the earth,
A ray of light that became a fruit,
The diminutive fire of a planet.
I just love how Neruda praised the lemon using all sensory faculties. It is very refreshing to see the lemon celebrated and glorified, quite a turnaround from the bad reputation the lemon gets for the sourness and bitterness it symbolically represents in our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment