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June 19, 2015

Ode to the Watermelon

Frida-Kahlo-watermelon.jpg
Frida Kahlo - Viva la Vida, Watermelons - 1954

Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Watermelon"

The tree of intense
summer,
hard,
is all blue sky,
yellow sun, fatigue in drops,
a sword
above the highways,
a scorched shoe
in the cities:
the brightness and the world
weigh us down,
hit us
in the eyes
with clouds of dust,
with sudden golden blows,
they torture
our feet
with tiny thorns,
with hot stones,
and the mouth
suffers
more than all the toes:
the throat
becomes thirsty,
the teeth,
the lips, the tongue:
we want to drink
waterfalls,
the dark blue night,
the South Pole,
and then
the coolest of all
the planets crosses
the sky,
the round, magnificent,
star-filled watermelon.
It's a fruit from the thirst-tree.
It's the green whale of the summer.
The dry universe
all at once
given dark stars
by this firmament of coolness
lets the swelling
fruit
come down:
its hemispheres open
showing a flag
green, white, red,
that dissolves into
wild rivers, sugar,
delight!
Jewel box of water, phlegmatic
queen
of the fruitshops,
warehouse
of profundity, moon
on earth!
You are pure,
rubies fall apart
in your abundance,
and we
want
to bite into you,
to bury our
face
in you, and
our hair, and
the soul!
When we're thirsty
we glimpse you
like
a mine or a mountain
of fantastic food,
but
among our longings and our teeth
you change
simply
into cool light
that slips in turn into
spring water
that touched us once
singing.
And that is why
you don't weigh us down
in the siesta hour
that's like an oven,
you don't weigh us down,
you just
go by
and your heart, some cold ember,
turned itself into a single
drop of water.

--trans. Robert Bly

Posted by mehrdad at 01:48 PM | Poems | Watermelon |

September 17, 2012

The Last Paintings

Diego-Rivera-watermelon.jpg
Diego Rivera - The Watermelons - 1957


Frida-Kahlo-watermelon.jpg
Frida Kahlo - Viva la Vida, Watermelons - 1954


Apparently, both Frida Kahlo's and Diego Rivera's last paintings are of watermelons.

Posted by mehrdad at 02:15 PM | Art | Watermelon |

November 02, 2011

18 Seeds per Inch

18seeds.jpg

Watermelon with 18 SPI (seeds per inch)

Posted by mehrdad at 11:21 AM | Watermelon |

September 04, 2006

Hippo Look-alike

hippomelon.jpg

Hippopotamus and Watermelon!

Posted by mehrdad at 02:44 PM | Look-alikes | Watermelon |

March 16, 2004

Cosmic Watermelon

watermelon.jpg

The image on the left was taken by the Hubble space telescope of the Cat's Eye Nebula; an exploding star 3,000 light years away, the image was published by NASA on Oct 31, 1999.

Posted by mehrdad at 05:44 PM | Look-alikes | Watermelon |