Food Poem Fridays: Roy Blount, Jr.'s SONG TO ONIONS

Song to Onions

By Roy Blount, Jr.

They improve everything, pork chops to soup,
And not only that but each onion's a group.

Peel back the skin, delve into tissue

And see how an onion has been blessed with issue.
Every layer produces an ovum:
You think you've got three then you find you've got fovum.

Onion on on—Ion on onion they run,

Each but the smallest one some onion's mother:
An onion comprises a half-dozen other.
In sum then an onion you could say is less

Than the sum of its parts.
But then I like things that more are than profess—
In food and the arts.
Things pungent, not tony.

I'll take Damon Runyon
Over Antonioni—Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion.

I'm anti-baloney.
Although a baloney sandwich would
Right now, with onions, be right good.

And so would sliced onions,

Chewed with cheese,

Or onions chopped and sprinkled

Over black-eyed peas:
Black-eyed,

grey-gravied,

absorbent of essences,

eaten on New Year's Eve
peas.