poem offering

[truepenny]

David Kirby, Saving the Young Men of Vienna (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987):


Beets

I pass over them in the cafeteria,
and at the homes of friends,
I eat around them.
I have always eaten around them.

Oh, you take your asparagus,
your oysters, your single-malt whiskey:
these we love because they are so different.

but the juice of the beet
is blood-red and sweet,

and once, when I bit one, long ago,
it resisted, then split softly,
like some unnecessary part of myself
that had been boiled
and left to cool,
unwanted, alone,
deserving no better fate.

--David Kirby