Ode to the Onion

Tadashi Ohashi

Ode to the 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.

Pablo Neruda

“Under the earth the miracle happened”. (Right now, in gardens all over.) It is impossible not to love Neruda. I see him when I read this poem, holding an onion up to the light and addressing it, "luminous flask, to me you are more beautiful than a bird.." And maybe it seems silly - to write a poem to an onion, to praise the qualities of a vegetable, to appreciate the way it is formed, how it is translucent, and has little crystal-like cells, and though it grew in soil, is full of water. Maybe it seems childish, to hold up an onion and realize how it looks like a little globe, a planet, that it shines in its own way, even though it was born in darkness. "You make us cry without hurting us." How true. But what strikes me most as I read this poem is that I hold an onion in my hands nearly every day. I cry without pain  - as I cut into its flesh. At this very moment my kitchen is bathed in its fragrance. What seems silly to me now is that I did not recognize the miracle of it, the essence of hope and wonder and abundance embodied in it. Neruda! ("I have praised everything that exists." What a statement. He wasn't comprehensive, but he got a good start. If you read his "Odes", he even manages to praise a table.) This is the way we should live, in prayers of praise every day. In wonder.