Peaches always remind me of lazy summer days swimming in Lake Sam Rayburn with my best friend and our children. Laughing and eating Jacksonville peaches, juice dripping down our arms and not getting out until the purple-pink-gold-purple-pink sun slips behind the silhouette of pine trees.
LI-Young Lee captures the essence of summer with this meditative poem. Let us set aside our anxiety about what the future might hold and be present with all our senses to the simple joy of eating a peach!
From Blossoms
A cluster of peaches ripening on a peach tree
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
– Li-Young Lee