Onion, fruit of grace,
you swell in the garden
hidden as the heart of God,
but you are not about religion.
Onion, frying into all those Os,
you are a perfect poet,
and you are not about that.
Onion, I love you,
you sleek, auburn beauty,
you break my heart though
I know you don’t mean
to make me cry.
Peeling your paper skin,
I cry. Chopping you,
I cry. Slicing off
your wiry roots,
I cry like a penitent
at communion, onion.
Tasting grace, layer by layer,
I eat your sweet hear
that burns like the Savior’s.
The sun crust you pull on
while you’re still underground,
I’ve peeled it.
Onion, I’m eating
God’s tears.
Julia Kasdorf from Eve’s Striptease
Whom do I contact to get permission to reprint the poem
“Onion, fruit of grace”?
Bruce, Sorry for the late response. I don’t check on this blog often enough. here’s some info on the author. Your should contact the University of Pittsburgh Press.
ron
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Julia Spicher Kasdorf was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, in 1962. She was educated at Goshen College and New York University. Her books of poetry include Eve’s Striptease (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and Sleeping Preacher (1992), which received the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing in 1993.
She is also the author of the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2003) and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, 1991-1999 (2001), which won the Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association’s Conference on Christianity and Literature. With Michael Tyrell, she edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (2007).
Her work has been described by the poet Eamon Grennan as “Crosshatched by body, spirit, and the relation between them; animated by bright instinctive exchanges between carnal and religious zones of experience; driven by an honest, explicitly female consciousness of what ‘animal’ and ’soul’ might mean.”
Kasdorf’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies, including the 2003 Pushcart collection. She currently teaches creative writing at Pennsylvania State University.