“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries–
All ripe together
In summer weather–
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy.”
Christina Rossetti
This is a small excerpt from Victorian poet Christina Rossetti’s epic poem Goblin Market. You can find the whole text online. I am using this poem in my essay on food in poetry.
Tags: Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
Another poem about eating and poetry I just found on the back cover of an old grade school poetry book, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. It is Eve Merriam’s poem titled “How To Eat A Poem.”
Here’s an excerpt.
Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
I wonder if this poem inspired Mark Strand. It sure inspires me.
Lovingly,
The Poetry Nag
Tags: Eve Merriam
I just received this book on a recommendation from my adviser last semester, the book is an epic poem written on December 22, 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts about one day. Broken into six parts, as Alice Notley wrote “Midwinter Day,” “is an epic poem about a daily routine.”
Tags: Bernadette Mayer, poetry
“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”
Mark Strand
1