Poetry time!

“Tomatoes” by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

*Notes: This is actually a fun poem to write a short paper about. At dahil mayabang ako (or baka dahil tanga ako) I decided to post the short paper here in my blog for the whole world to see and admire (and insult and criticize. oh wait, di nga pala palaging negative ang criticism. cge, criticize negatively na lang). Feel ko lang ito yung pinaka-ok na short paper na nasulat ko ever for Lit. All the others suck worse than this one, so you can imagine how bad the others would be. I'm also expecting some people *ahem ahem* especially the "English masters" *ahem ahem* to comment kahit negative. Or at least if nahihiya kayo magcomment sa short paper ko, at least comment about the poem, because it's a beautiful poem, and an easy one at that.

And here's the paper. :D

There doesn’t seem to be a real, sure way of defining what is and is not a poem. Certain poems are written in prose form, but claim to be poems, while some poems seem to be merely prose in disguise.

In “Tomatoes”, the author Stephen Dobyns utilizes the narrative form of poetry to tell the story of a woman who undergoes plastic surgery, only to be killed immediately after. Her son then has trouble identifying her among ten different women who have all been shot, so he decides to take home all their remains and grows tomatoes while using the remains as fertilizers. Although the poem, at first glance, looks nothing more than a story with line breaks randomly inserted in it, what makes this narrative poem a poem is how it tells a story on the surface while having a much deeper meaning underneath the simple words. In fact, the simplicity of the poem is almost humorous in how lightly it talks of the topic at hand. For example, in the sixth line, it says “Bang, she’s dead.” without the least bit of pity or sadness. While this might feel cold and apathetic to some, it actually gives more emphasis to the poem’s message.

What is the poem’s message anyway? The first part of the poem, where the women travels to Brazil for cosmetic surgery, gets killed and cannot be identified by her son, and the second part, in which the son plants tomatoes, seem to have no connection with each other.

Beneath the seemingly absurd tale, however, lies the true meaning of the poem. Notice the parallelism between the two parts, especially the repeated mention of the mother’s breasts, and the consoling touch of her hands. In the first part, the son is detached from his mother’s presence. He had no idea which one his mother is, and so being the filial son that he is, he took home all the remains, even those of the other women, just so he could keep his mother’s. Yet he was able to solve the problem of being unable to identify his mother’s remains. He buried all the remains into the ground and grew tomatoes from them, and in the tomatoes he was once again reunited with his mother. As the last line tells us, “Try to imagine the filial starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.” Through the tomatoes, the son was able to fulfill his filial duty and receive his mother’s love.

BTW, di ba may nagsasabing mayayabang ang mga taga-Ateneo? Well. It's true. XD