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Onion, luminous flask

• by Laura, February 19, 2009

Nope.  No photo here.

You see, my Nikon digital camera (only a couple years old) is shot to hell, and it’s really cramping my blogging style.  But I’m getting annoyed at my dependence on the photo.  As a writer I love words.  Why aren’t they enough?  Do readers always need the encouragement of the image, the entertainment?  Well not today dear friends. 

Nancy frequently tells me that modern photography and digital life overwhelm us visually--but we don’t really see or think because the images are pre-defined and closed.  There is no place for the human to enter.  She’s spoken to me a lot about the open-ness of Pierre Bonnard’s exhibit currently at the Met in New York .  I hope Nancy will share some of her insights on this amazing show with so many food images.  Painting is a tonic for modern life.

For the same reasons, literature is too--with its open gestures and suggestions, the room it leaves us for imagination.  That’s why today, I’m posting Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to an Onion.”

I dare you to read it aloud (in English or, even better, the original Spanish, which follows).  And then I challenge you--any of you out there--to send a photo of an onion that rivals this.  Here goes:

Ode to an Onion

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.

Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

Oda a la cebolla

Cebolla,
luminosa redoma,
pétalo a pétalo
se formó tu hermosura,
escamas de crystal te acrecentaron
y en el secreto de la tierra oscura
se redondeó tu vientre de rocío.
Bajo la tierra
fue el milagro
y cuando apareció
tu torpe tallo verde,
y nacieron
tus hojas como espadas en el huerto,
la tierra acumuló su poderío
mostrando tu desnuda transparencia,
y como en Afrodita el mar remoto
duplicó la magnolia
levantando sus senos,
la tierra
así te hizo,
cebolla,
clara como un planeta,
y destinada ,
a relucir ,
constelación constante,
redonda rosa de agua,
sobre
la mesa
de las pobres gentes.

Nos hiciste llorar sin afligirnos.
Yo cuanto existe celebré, cebolla,
pero para mi eres
más hermosa que un ave
de plumas cegadoras
eres para mis ojos
globo celeste, copa de platino,
baile inmóvil
de anémona nevada

y vive la fragancia de la tierra
en tu naturaleza cristalina.

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