Ode to the Onion...

Or more accurately - as the young Chilean poets who pop in to Owsblog will know - “Oda a la Cebolla” – original version (in Spanish) here. - by Pablo Neruda
(the picture isn't him!)

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 common people.
Generous
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent consumation of the pot,
and the crystal shred
to the ignited heat of the oil
is transformed into curly gold pen.

Also I will remember as the love
of the salad fertilizes your influences,
and seems that the sky contributes
giving you a fine hail form
to celebrate your clarity pricked
on the hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the hands of the humbled people,
watered with oil,
dusted
with a little salt,
kill the hunger
of the day laborer in the hard footpath.

Star of the poor men,
fairy godmother
surrounded
in delicate
paper, sprout from the ground,
eternal, intact, pure
like seed of star,
and when the knife
sliced you
in the kitchen raises
the only tear without pain.
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,
for my eyes you are
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

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

He also wrote odes re wine, artichokes, lemons, couples, secret love and the beautiful nude, all good stuff. I thought of going on about Health and Nutrition but I think you all know that they're good for you...in fact in Spain some say, rather crudely, that "come cebolla y levanta la polla"!...but did you know that although Pablo writes "you make us cry without hurting us" what is actually happening is an enzyme attack on sulphides leading to a chemical chain reaction that ends with a mild sulphuric acid irritation? Lovely.

Onions, do you know yours? More here

S.O.