Ode to the First Peach Only one insect has feasted here, a clear stub of resin plugs the scar. And the hollow where the stem was severed shines with juice. The fur still silvered like a caul. Even in the next minute, the hairs will darken, turn more golden in my palm. Heavier, this flesh, than you would imagine like the sudden weight of a newborn. Oh what a marriage of citron and blush! It could be a planet reflected through a hall of mirrors. Or what a swan becomes when a fairy shoots it from the sky at dawn. At the beginning of the world, when the first dense pith was ravished and the stars were not yet lustrous coins fallen from the pockets of night, who could have dreamed this would be curried from the chaos. Scent of morning and sugar, bruise and hunger. Silent, swollen, clefted life, remnant always remaking itself out of that first flaming ripeness. First published on pages 58 – 59 in Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press 2014. Link to the video -- https://youtu.be/kMCN6D6Dkjw A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Ellen Bass' latest book is Indigo (Copper Canyon, 2020). Among her awards are Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and her poems regularly appear in The New Yorker and other journals. She teaches in Pacific University's MFA program.
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AboutThe poems that follow are powerful evidence that Poetry Speaks Back to Hunger! Archives
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