Ode To The Onion

Portrait of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda 1904–1973

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.

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  1. Lee United States

    The theme is about new life. He is directly speaking about an onion, but he is symbollicaly speaking of new life, like a newborn child. There are many forms of imagery as well.

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