From Blossoms

CoVid affects our ability to taste, smell, and touch. It is an anti-sensory disease.  So... welcome to Sensory Saturdays! Each Saturday, I'll send pieces that are packed with sensory and (appropriately) sensual images.  

Tonight's piece, "From Blossoms," is by Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee.   Lee, whose parents came to the USA as political refugees, has been the distinguished recipient of the Whiting Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  I want to elevate his voice first because his poetry is beautiful in its own right, and also to echo the admonishment against the current rise in hate speech.

No further ado.

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From Blossoms

by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.