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Gratefulness
Today, the sun-glazed bag of lemons adorning the white counter became in my imagination, not a bag grabbed hastily from supermarket bins overflowing with fruit, pepper, and melon but rather that each lemon was plucked tenderly from a limestone grove on the Coast of Amalfi, where the salt-tinged air is ripe with birdsong and each syrupy-sweet lemony-goodness is a fist-sized delight in my hands, that drops into a cradle of wicker and twine.
I pull the mesh bag’s netting loose, as though everything now requires reverence, as though I could honor the journey of hands—not my own— hands that brought such luscious fruit to market without the slightest recognition.
My own hands twist the golden orbs, over and over marveling at their scented beauty.
My hands were honored in this way by these heavenly lemons,
as I sighed in front of the kitchen window.
Posted by kind permission of Michelle Courtney Berry. Image by Ernest Porzi/Unsplash.
“My hands were honored in this way by these heavenly lemons,” used in this poem, is a line after Pablo Neruda’s, “My feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks,” from “Ode to My Socks” from Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems, by Pablo Neruda and translated by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
This ode was among more than 100 responses to our invitation to write an ode to an “ordinary thing.” We share it here with delight and gratitude.
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