Personal Choice Volume 2 No.12

Pablo Neruda wrote glorious odes to many foods, including lemons, tomatoes, artichokes, salt, and an onion. He had a lot of food love to share.

from Pablo Neruda’s poem Ode to a Lemon

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 . . .

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,

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).