Praises
Thomas McGrath

The vegetables please us with their modes and virtues.

                                                                                  The demure heart

Of the lettuce inside its circular court, baroque ear

Of quiet under its rustling house of lace, pleases

Us.

      And the bold strength of the celery, its green Hispanic

¡Shout! its exclamatory confetti.

                                                  And the analogue that is Onion:

Ptolemaic astronomy and tearful allegory, the Platonic circles

Of His inexhaustible soul!

                                       O and the straightforwardness

In the labyrinth of Cabbage, the infallible rectitude of Homegrown Mushroom

Under its cone of silence like a papal hat —

                                                                  All these

Please us.

                And the syllabus of the corn,

                                                            that wampum,

                                                                                   its golden

Roads leading out of the wigwams of its silky and youthful smoke;

The nobility of the dill, cool in its silences and cathedrals;

Tomatoes five-alarm fires in their musky barrios, peas

Asleep in their cartridge clips,

                                              beetsblood,

                                                                colonies of the imperial

Cauliflower, and the buddha-like seeds of the pepper

Turning their prayerwheels in the green gloom of their caves.

All these we praise: they please us all ways: these smallest virtues.

All these earth-given: 

                                 and the heaven-hung fruit also...

                                                                                    As instance

Banana which continually makes angelic ears out of sour

Purses, or the winy abacus of the holy grape on its cross

Of alcohol, or the peach with its fur like a young girl's —

All these we praise: the winter in the flesh of the apple, and the sun

Domesticated under the orange's rind.

                                                          We praise

By the skin of our teeth, Persimmon, and Pawpaw's constant

Affair with gravity, and the proletariat of the pomegranate

Inside its leathery city.

                                   And let us praise all these

As they please us: skin, flesh, flower, and the flowering

Bones of their seeds: from which come orchards: bees: honey:

Flowers, love's language, love, heart's ease, poems, praise.