LEMON & FETA ROASTED ARTICHOKES WITH FRESH MINT.

I want to talk to you about spring and poetry and artichokes and broken hearts. I want to tell you about the many ways my heart has fractured that I didn’t even know were possible—for country, for family, for the devastation of land betrayed by the very people who ought to steward it. I want to talk to you about roasted lemons and sheep’s milk feta and fresh mint. I want to show you things that I can’t talk about yet. I want to confess how the extra hour of sunshine was hard for me this year, how much I relished the dark and the storms and the rain in California this winter.

But let’s go into the poetry for a moment. This week brought us World Poetry Day, which made me realize I haven’t ever come out to you as the poetry-writing, poetry-reading, poetry lover that I am. I wrote reams and reams of poetry from age fifteen on (all of which I still have, in one gargantuan file on my computer), much of which made my English teachers deeply uncomfortable (somehow I was writing about sex long before I ever had it, lol). And at eighteen, I started carrying around a slim volume of Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses.

His language made my breath change its rhythm, made me think about love differently, made me wonder if I could ever feel so fully about a person or a home or a loaf of bread as he did. Here’s one of my favorites (translated by Donald S. Walsh):

The Dream

Walking on the sands

I decided to leave you.

I was treading a dark clay
that trembled
and I, sinking and coming out,
decided that you should come out
of me, that you were weighing me down
like a cutting stone,
and I worked out your loss
step by step:
to cut off your roots,
to release you alone into the wind.

Ah in that minute,
my dear, a dream
with its terrible wings
was covering you.

You felt yourself swallowed by the clay,
and you called to me and I did not come,
you were going, motionless,
without defending yourself
until you were smothered in the quicksand.

Afterwards
my decision encountered your dream,
and from the rupture
that was breaking our hearts
we came forth clean again, naked,
loving each other,
without dream, without sand,
complete and radiant,
sealed by fire.

I carried The Captain’s Verses with me to college, into the woods on hikes, to breakfast with friends, on the Metro North train from New Haven into Manhattan. I took it with me to classes on bioethics and theater history. I took it on dates in noisy bars. I thought the poems would watch over me, a benediction of eloquence and feeling.

They reminded me of my heart, no matter where I was. They were an anchor to what mattered.

As I left college, as my writing moved more towards prose than stanza, I relished new poets. Sharon Olds and Naomi Shihab Nye and Adrienne Rich. Women who wrote about sex and children and relationship in the way I hoped I could one day, too. Unflinching. Without looking away. Eyes all the way open. Here is a favorite from Sharon Olds, from her collection The Dead and the Living:

Ecstasy

As we made love for the third day,
cloudy and dark, as we did not stop
but went into it and into it and
did not hesitate and did not hold back
we rose through the air,
until we were up above
the timber line. The lake lay
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of snow
brilliant white, and even though we
did not know where we were, we could not
speak the language, we could hardly see, we
did not stop, rising with the black
rocks to the black hills, the black
mountains rising from the hills. Resting
on the crest of the mountains, one huge
cloud with scalloped edges of blazing
evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back.

In a way, I think the reading of poetry, or any transportive work of literature, is also an ecstatic act, a place from which no one has ever come back. The words, configured just so, remind us of nothing and of everything—an utterly sublime window into human experience. They birth us anew. A spring.

And so, for poetry, for spring, for all the loves you have now and the ones before, too, here are artichokes, tender and sweet and new.

This preparation is an all-time favorite: Roasting them with plenty of lemon and olive oil, and layers of breadcrumbs and garlic and feta, makes for incredibly tender hearts and leaves, with the perfect blend of caramelized edges and rich flavors. Topped with fresh mint and toasted pine nuts, they’re a poetry of artichokes. I know you’re going to love them as much as I did.

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