Onions…

 

Ode To The Onion by Pablo Neruda

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

Oh my how I love this poem!  A poem of beauty in the mundane….

The word prompt for day three of CBC was multilayered.  Although I certainly wasn’t creative with my choice of onions, I wanted to try to photograph a still life in a more formal manner than I have before.  I had a lot of fun gathering as many types of onions as I could find in the market…I forgot the leeks…And I had fun trying to set up the black background I envisioned…  I used an old black velvet shirt…I then went all around the house looking for the right light…

 

I did take a lot of pictures…and it was fun…

 

Now I need to look up some onions dishes…maybe onion soup?

Watermelon Days…

We have been enjoying watermelon here in Arcadia….

I created this diptych  for CBC’s word prompt “Picnic”.  It was the first time I made one in Photoshop and I will not admit how long it took me to figure it out… That white cup under Mr J’s arm is annoying me but I find those watermelon juice lines and his little smile in the shadows precious. 

Am I the only one that misses the seeds and thinks that the old seedfull watermelons were sweeter even if slightly annoying?   How will children ever learn about seed spitting contests?   Also, I find it interesting that we are now notified that we may find an occasional seed even as we are learning that we may be reducing our risk of heart disease.  I admit that I investigated www. watermelon.org., and while I enjoyed reading the history of watermelon and learning that seedless watermelon does not involve genetic modification I was horrified at this recipe for watermelon jelly logs .  In all fairness I did find this recipe for a Watermelon Cosmopolitan that sounded like something I would try.

After an afternoon of grandchildren I was still left with plenty of watermelon for one of my favorite summer salads since 1995 when I first found it in the newspaper…so easy and so so yummy…

Ivory…

Maybe it is because the weather has been too nice to sit at the computer, or because I’ve been too busy with family obligations, or because I need the structure of a photography class but I have not been motivated to take many pictures lately….   Then this morning Beth at Be Yourself...Everyone Else is Taken mentioned Creativity Boot Camp and I decided to join in…in hopes of getting back to photographing and posting more.  What attracted me was in part that this course is only two weeks long and free…no pressure…just fun.  The first word prompt is “Ivory” and I don’t think I was very creative with my subject but when I heard the word all I could think of was creamy white Kousa dogwood blossoms…