A Poem a Day...

I think my research assignment is getting to me. This keeps running through my head, so now I shall curse you in the manner I have been cursed. If you would, please direct your attention to Langston Hughes:


What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?


This made me remember the Onion poem. Please don't ask me how. Or why.



"Song to Onions" Ray Blount, Jr.


They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion's a group.

Peel back the skin, delve into tissue
And see how an onion has been blessed with an issue.

Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you've got three then you find you've got fovum.

Onion on on-
Ion on onion the run,
Each but the smallest one some onion's mother:
And onion comprises a half-dozen other.

In sum then an onion you could say is less
Than the sum of its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess-
In food and in the arts.

Things pungent, not tony.
I'll take Damon Runyon
Over Antonioni-
Who if an i wanders becoms Anti-onion.
I'm anti-baloney.

Although a boloney sandwich would
Right now, with onions, be right good.

And so would sliced onions,
Cewed with cheese.
Or onions chopped and sprinkled
Over black-eyed peas:

Black-eyed,
grey-gravied,
absorbent of essences,
eaton on New Year's Eve
peas.




How this man was published, I'll never know. But I commend every moment of it.