Ode To Tomatoes

And Also To Tomatillos:

This morning I found this beautiful gift in the garden, somehow left from last summer's harvest.

By the time you read this, it has been planted.

Ode To Tomatoes by Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue salt cellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign magesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profoound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer, the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery colour
and cool completeness.

With such a mild winter, the tomatoes have continued to grow, slowly and quietly. Somehow they have found nourishment on their withered vines.....the ones I forgot to pull out last fall.....and now they offer their sweet, ripe goodness.

Today, in this house, and completely out of season in most places, we celebrate the rich goodness of the tomato
...and the promise of the tomatillo.

Salad for lunch!

Oda al Tomate, in Spanish, here

Thanks, Richard Banks, for posting this poem on Facebook in response to my tomato bruschetta photo. I might not have noticed the tomatillo in the garden, so well hidden but badly placed for growing, if I had not been thinking of the sweet sensuality of Neruda's words on all things tomato.