Glyko Karythi: Green Walnut Spoon Sweet [Greek]
What falls, will fall of its own accord
because the season dictates it— acorns
and chestnuts on the ground, leaves now
beginning their russet plunge. No sword
needs to sever the filaments, no word
except what blows, mostly unseen, through
the late hours. Sometimes the light thud
of a globed body: hard green pear, gourd
bitter with unripe longings. Fall’s rewards,
we think, are tinted scarlet: apples, late-
blushed nectarines we gather, moving from tree
to tree. But also the rough, raw, blurred.
A stinkbug on the railing drops, not quite unheard,
to the porch floor. The seed’s housed in a shell
that cracks to metaphor. I marvel at how walnuts
packed whole in honey were once hard, uncured;
but yield all, steeped long in sweetness, complex art—skin,
flesh, bone you could cut, clear to the wrinkled heart.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Gleaning
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
I was so amazed at the way you turned the walnut into a heart, and the gourd, bitter with unripe longings. I love it, really love it!
Thanks, Joanna! I was trying to post the ????? ?????? Greek transcription of the sweet’s name here, but haven’t been successful… :)
There it goes again, won’t take it. Will have to clean that up later!
That’s my fault, Luisa — when I set Via Negativa up on this server, I used an outdated installation script that didn’t choose UTF-8 character encoding, and it’s a bitch to try to go back and reconfigure the database after the fact (though somehow I did figure it out for VN’s sister-site Moving Poems). So VN doesn’t do Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc, just Roman. Maybe I’ll give it another go…
BTW I didn’t know there was such a thing as an 18-line sonnet! I’m impressed that you were able to do so well with my woefully unpoetic prompt (“thwack”?!).
Δοκιμές 1, 2 … δοκιμές 1, 2 …
O.K., database rejiggered! We are now UTF-8ified, Luisa, and you should be able to post non-Latin characters to your heart’s content.