FOOD

Helen Dunmore, Wild Strawberries, 2001:

What I get, I bring home to you: a dark handful, sweet-edged, dissolving in one mouthful. I bother to bring them for you though theyre so quickly over, pulpless, sliding to juice a grainy rub on the tongue and the tastes gone. If you remember we were in the woods at wild strawberry-time and I was making a basket of dock-leaves to hold what youd picked, but the cold leaves unplaited themselves and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves until I gave up and ate wild strawberries out of your hands for sweetness. I licked at your palm: the little salt-edge there, the tang of money youd handled. As we stayed in the woods, hidden, we heard the sound system below us calling the winners at Chepstow, faint as the breeze turned. The sun came out on us, the shade blotches went hazel: we heard names bubble like stock-doves over the woods as jockeys in stained silks gentled those sweat-dark, shuddering horses down to the walk.

Michael Symmons Roberts, Jairus, 2004:

So, God takes your child by the hand and pulls her from her deathbed. He says: Feed her, she is ravenous.

You give her fruits with thick hides pomegranate, cantaloupe food with weight, to keep her here. You hope that if she eats enough the light and dust and love which weave the matrix of her body will not fray, nor wear so thin that morning sun breaks through her, shadowless, complete. Somehow this reanimation has cut sharp the fear of death, the shock of presence. Feed her roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread: forget the herbs, she has an aching fast to break. Sit by her side, split skins for her so she can gorge, and notice how the dawn draws colour to her just-kissed face.

Sujata Bhatt The Stinking Rose, 1995:

Everything I want to say is in that name for these cloves of garlic they shine like pearls still warm from a womans neck My fingernail nudges and nicks the smell open, a round smell that spirals up. Are you hungry? Does it burn through your ears? Did you know some cloves were planted near the coral-coloured roses to provoke the petals into giving stronger perfume Everything is in that name for garlic: Roses and smells and the art of naming Whats in a name? that which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet But that which we call garlic smells sweeter, more

vulnerable, even delicate if we call it The Stinking Rose. The roses on the table, the garlic in the salad and the salt teases our ritual tasting to last longer. You who dined with us tonight, this garlic will sing to your heart to your slippery muscles will keep your nipples and your legs fromsleeping. Fragrant blood full of garlic yes, they noted it reeked under the microscope. His fingers tried after peeling and crushing the stinking rose, the sticky cloves Still, in the middle of the night his fingernail nudges and nicks her very own smell Her prism open.

Laurie Lee Apples, 1985:

Behold the apples rounded worlds: juice-green of July rain, the black polestar of flowers, the rind mapped with its crimson stain. The russet, crab and cottage red burn to the suns hot brass, then drop like sweat from every branch and bubble in the grass. They lie as wanton as they fall, and where they fall and break, the stallion clamps his crunching jaws, the starling stabs his beak. In each plump gourd the cidery bite of boys teeth tears the skin; the waltzing wasp consumes his share, the bent worm enters in. I, with as easy hunger, take entire my seasons dole; welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour, the hollow and the whole.