Peeling Onions by Adrienne Rich
I have never once chopped an onion without ending up with tears streaming down my cheeks and my eyes burning as if they were on fire. It’s such a shame that so many dishes taste better with onions or I’d avoid them like the plague!
Peeling Onions
By Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There’s not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Crying was labor, once
when I’d good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I though, must stare.
A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—
yet all that stayed
stuffed in my lungs like smog.
These old tears in the chopping-bowl.
