Sweetness, Always

Sweetness, Always

by Pablo Neruda

Why such harsh machinery?

Why, to write down the stuff

and people of every day,

must poems be dressed up in gold,

in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather

which scarcely weigh, mild verses

with the intimacy of beds

where people have loved and dreamed.

I want poems stained

by hands and every dayness.

Verses of pastry which melt

into milk and sugar in the mouth,

air and water to drink,

the bites and kisses of love.

I long for eatable sonnets,

poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us

to lift ourselves skyward

or to make deep and useless

tunnels underground.

So we forget the joyous

love-needs of our bodies.

We forget about pastries.

We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,

I saw a sugary pyramid,

a tower of confectionery —

one level after another,

and in the construction,rubies,

and other blushing delights,

medieval and yellow.

Someone dirtied his hands

to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here

and there, from earth and sky,

from Medellin, from Veracruz,

Abyssinia, Antofagasta,

do you know the recipe for honeycombs?

Let’s forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up

the equinoctial pastry shop

our mouths long to devour —

all the children’s mouths

and the poor adults’ also.

Don’t go on without seeing,

relishing, understanding

all these hearts of sugar.

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With us or without us,

sweetness will go on living

and is infinitely alive,

forever being revived,

for it’s in a man’s mouth,

whether he’s eating or singing,

that sweetness has its place.

                        —Translated by Alistair Reid

(source)

Daniel Buren, The Exploded Hut, homage to Oscar Niemeyer, situated work, 2015

Michael Pollan Quote

From “This is Your Mind on Plants” (2021)

Would people have ever discovered coffee or tea, let alone continued to drink them for hundreds of years, if not for caffeine?  There are countless other seeds and leaves that can be steeped in hot water to make a beverage, and some number of them surely taste better than coffee or tea, but where are the shrines to those plants in our homes and offices and shops?  Let’s face it: The rococo structures of meaning we’ve erected atop those psychoactive molecules are just culture’s way of dressing up our desire to change consciousness in the finery of metaphor and association.  Indeed, what really commends these beverages to us is their association not with wood smoke or stone fruit or biscuits, but with the experience of well-being—of euphoria—they reliably give us.

The Treehouses at HoneyTree Farm

Frediricksburg Texas

© HoneyTree Farm