This poem by Robert Paul Smith is my last farewell to this year’s tomatoes. I found it in one of my favorite books, Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables. It immediately stuck a chord, for me, as a gardener, tomato lover and locavore. I was suprised to find out it was writen in 1954.
And Another Thing…
The tomato sat on the plate And it looked like a tomato, like a real tomato Not like a picture in a magazine It was red, mostly But also it was yellow, somewhat And, in places, orange And, at the stem end, green. The kitchen knife sat on the plate And the tomato cut like a tomato Resistant, to a degree Soft, up to a point; And some of the seeds stayed in And some fell on the white plate. The tomato tasted like a tomato, And I said to the kids, who know tomatoes As pure red, perfectly round, Perfectly tasteless Absolutely uniform wet globes that come in cardboard And cellophane package all year round “Kids, time for you to taste a real tomato.” They did. And one of them looked at me And said, “Is that what tomato tastes like?” Yes, my children, that is what a tomato tastes like.
Tuesday September 9th, 2008 in Plant Stories | No comments »
This poem by Robert Paul Smith is my last farewell to this year’s tomatoes. I found it in one of my favorite books, Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables. It immediately stuck a chord, for me, as a gardener, tomato lover and locavore. I was suprised to find out it was writen in 1954.