Join the Poetry Friday Roundup with Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone.
We had a very wet Spring which seemed to last well into what should have been Summer. All that rain delayed the planting of everything from corn to (my summer favorite) tomatoes. All of the farm stands around us have been bursting with zucchini for weeks now with nary the sight of a single tomato…until today.
Today I came upon a farm stand with a glorious pile of fat fire-engine red tomatoes, sitting next to pint boxes of cherry tomatoes. I scraped together all the change I had to buy a box (all the change available between the seats and under the mats of the car), which I placed carefully on the seat next to me.
My first thought was to save them for a lovely salad at lunch tomorrow.
But, those tomatoes kept calling to me.
The road home was banked by cornfields on one side, green gold under a perfectly blue summer sky. Great bales of hay sat basking in the sun on the other side, their just-cut scent still wafting through the air.
So, I had a second thought, the best thought of the day, really. One by one, I ate each all the way home.
Cherry Tomatoes
by Anne Higgins
Suddenly it is August again, so hot, breathless heat. I sit on the ground in the garden of Carmel, picking ripe cherry tomatoes and eating them. They are so ripe that the skin is split, so warm and sweet from the attentions of the sun, the juice bursts in my mouth, an ecstatic taste, and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer, sloshing in the saliva of August. Hummingbirds halo me there, in the great green silence, and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.