The Onion

[ralex003]

Light filters to me through leaves
camouflaging the back field
as I lean, palms pressed upon cool marble,
over a spine-broken book of your recipes;

dog-eared, well-thumbed,
inclined agin a rolling pin, Is there a typo in this line?
it instructs me
to peel and slice an onion.

Clasping the gleaming orb
worked from earth, my elbow yields
to density, then rebounds
from the board's wooden knell.

I nick and strip it's sere brown skin,
center and split to reveal
two pale discs of morning sun
and eclipsing one, begin to slice.

My dull blade chaws and stutters
through thick rotations, tearing layers
into one another and releasing
a keen earthy tang

that confronts and quickens
then blurs the senses
with concentrated tears; a furrowing
that needles the very middle of the mind. Nice way to expand on the way onions make our eyes water. You really flesh this out. This poem has layers like an onion.

But the sting is salved
when I scrape the grey mulch
into smoking oil and it spits and sizzles,
simmering to golden translucent clarity, Mouthwatering, sensual imagery. Nothing negative for me to say here.

liberating a sweet-savoury aroma
that stimulates a deeply satisfying
insatiable hunger to understand something
so much simpler and yet more accomplished than I. This makes me think about how simple and onion is and yet how layered it is. If you think about it, aren't we like onions with many layers to our personalities? What a great idea.

Great poem about something as simple as peeling an onion. I like that your topic is narrowed down from following a recipe to performing a specific step in that recipe. I'm a novice poet and have been working with this in my poetry. I just love this focus.