As some of you may know, when I’m not writing prose about food and other topics or trying to convince The Cheese-Hater to taste a piece of cheddar, I write poems. I went to graduate school what now seems like a thousand years ago at Boston University, where I studied with Derek Walcott. And though he’s generally thought of as a chronicler of empire, Caribbean history and the vagaries of the human heart, one of my favorite of his poems happens to be about lemons (though really, it’s also about empire and the human heart). It was originally printed in his 1976 book, Sea Grapes, but you can get it now in his Collected Poems: 1948-1984, which I can’t recommend highly enough and which has been my solace more times than I can count over the last twenty years. “Sunday Lemons” itself has some of my absolute favorite lines of poetry in existence, including “as the afternoon vagues/into indigo”— a perfect description of what the afternoon does, especially when you’re feeling uncertain about your place in the world, which is often the feeling Sunday afternoons seem to produce.
Sunday Lemons
Desolate lemons, hold
tight, in your bowl of earth,
the light to your bitter flesh,let a lemon glare
be all your armour
this naked Sunday,your inflexible light
bounce off the shields of apples
so real they seem waxen,share your acid silence
with this woman’s remembering
Sundays of other fruit,till by concentration
you grow, a phalanx of helmets
braced for anything,hexagonal cities where bees
died purely for sweetness,
your lamps be the last to goon this polished table
this Sunday, which demads
more than the faith of candlesthan helmeted conquistadors
dying like bees, multiplying
memories in her golden head;as the afternoon vagues
into indigo, let your lamps
hold in this darkening earthbowl, still life, but a life
beyond tears or the gaieties
of dew, the gay, neon dampof evening that blurs
the form of this woman lying,
a lemon, a flameless lamp.
