Narrative Magazine's Friday Feature: A Poem By Ruth Stone

Narrative Magazine: Ruth Stone, author of eleven poetry collections, has endured poverty, tragedy, and obscurity to emerge as a preeminent American poet who is still writing her ironic, musical poems at the age of ninety-six. The simplicity on the surface of the poems and the ordinariness of the topics, such as the apple in the poem featured here, belies the deeper power and mystery—even transcendence—of her writing.

"Eve, Also"

A POEM by Ruth Stone

HOLDING IN MY left hand an apple;
they told me it was naturally grown.
No sprays. Or if sprayed,
the spray’s not as deadly as some;
the skin, red as a Vermont
sunset in late summer,
when something, insects, pollution,
thickens the lower layers of air
and the light shifts to deep red,
slanting up from the rim of the world
that slopes downhill from us and then
the entire mountain and valley are bathed in it.
As if the sun is a giant ruby—
a jewel like Betelgeuse.
All this while, I am eating the apple;
its insides glowing
like the summer sun that rises
at the edge of morning.
A crisp yellow-white,
full of miracles;
eating its moderately poisoned fruit,
in this careless moment,
in this careless moment of life.

From "What Love Comes To"

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Comments

[Thisbeautifulplanet]

03:00 PM on 05/07/2011

Less is more and beautiful.

[lrobb]

02:55 PM on 05/07/2011

Put her in context.

She was born in 1915. Most of you live in houses built after she was.

She was a teenager who wondered why she didn't have a new prom dress when the Depression started.

She was 27, and old enough to see her security shattered if her husband and the father of her children was killed in WWII.

She saw her neighbor's and their children march off to Korea. Some of them didn't return.

She might have lost a son in Viet Nam.

She learned to navigate the Net.

She watched the Twin Towers fall.

She learned to program her Blackberry.

This is a woman to whom we need to listen. "Wise" is such a misnomer these days, because it appears to be conveyed to anyonewho has lived to see their children reach 18. So very, very wrong.

Ruth Stone is wise by any definiion. You do not have to like her poetry to agree.

[John Dav Redux]

05:14 PM on 05/07/2011

You could make a similar list about someone half her age. Apparently gratutious nostalgia is your sole criterion of good poetry. Others of us have actual standards.

"She was 27, and old enough to see her security shattered if her husband and the father of her children was killed in WWII." IF her husband was killed? But he wasn't. He committed suicide in 1959. But knowing that would take reading some a tiny biographical excerpt, which might require effort.

[lrobb]

02:43 PM on 05/07/2011

I prefer to refer to this a "jewel prose." Not to take anything from it, but at my age, 63, "poetry" is supposed to rhyme.

[John Dav Redux]

05:07 PM on 05/07/2011

Then you're a bourgeois hack that knows nothing about poetry, and shouldn't be talking about it.

[TheFriendlyAtheist]

10:39 AM on 05/30/2011

It's been over a 100 years since poetry was "supposed" to rhyme.

[Jake Thomas]

02:17 PM on 05/07/2011

Very evocative, she has not forgotten her child within.

[John Dav Redux]

05:14 PM on 05/07/2011

What does this even MEAN?

[Jake Thomas]

05:25 PM on 05/07/2011

I cut and pasted from a halmark card.

[behavingbadly]

09:08 AM on 05/07/2011

Loved it.

[nolabear]

03:45 PM on 05/06/2011

What a delight. I am off to find more of her work, and her story.

[CountLeo]

10:38 AM on 05/06/2011

Lovely poem. Made my morning. I will be reading more of Stone's work. The irony is biting (no pun intended).

[elevando]

10:24 AM on 05/06/2011

This piece has cavernous depth. I look forward to reading Ms. Stone's other poems

[John Dav Redux]

08:23 PM on 05/06/2011

You're so full of it.