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

Comments

[heresluck]

My god, I'm narcissistic. You posted this and my first thought was "hey! I mention beets in The Forthcoming Thingamabob!":

This month I cooked beets, which you dislike,
in five different ways.

I like Kirby's poem too, the way it goes from the amusingly banal first stanza to that astonishingly vivid and insightful last stanza. Cool.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's right. The Forthcoming Thingamabob has beets in!

Yeah, it's the last stanza that gets me. I looked at the poem and thought, This is a banal little poem about vegetables, for Christ's sake! Why are you demonstrating your shallow, trivial little mind by posting it? And then I got to that last bit, ... some unnecessary part of myself ... and said, Oh, yeah. Right. That's why.

It reminds me actually of the Naomi Shihab Nye poem ... argh! cannot think of title! The one about the rats--you know what I mean, you introduced me to it. But it has that same movement from the mundanely ordinary to, well, someplace else. I love poetry that does that.

[heresluck]

"Hello." I do love that poem. Hey, maybe that'll be tomorrow's!

Or, in the spirit of vegetables, I could do "The Traveling Onion." Except I think I would need an onion icon first.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

[Truepenny as Mephistopheles]
Maybe you need an onion icon anyway ...
[/T.as M.]

And I think you should post "Hello." But that's just 'cause I adore it.

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

Very cool. :o)

To keep in theme, here's my favorite vegetable poem (http://www.humorscope.com/poet.html#Rutabaga), from Humorscope.com's "Really Amazingly Bad Poems." *g*

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

ETA: The one in question is "Rutabaga Dreams," as the link seems to go mostly to the poem before.