Tomatoes of Kobarid by Christina Cook

Tomatoes of Kobari

by Christina Cook

Many of the Italian soldiers who died in the World War I Battle of Caporetto, near present- day Kobarid, Slovenia, had tomatoes from home in their pockets. In the years that followed, tomato plants sprang up in abundance throughout the site.

His wife planted the tomato like a kiss

in the deep breast pocket of his tunic.

Days later, he tastes the Tuscan sun

of its skin. Red flesh and seeds’

sweet jelly melt on his tongue,

as if a priest had placed it there.

Ave Maria sounds like summer hum of

insects gratia plena drizzle and birdsong, blades

Sancta Maria of grass beneath his boots,

noise from ora pro nobis sky to bone

to soil mortis nostrae, Amen.

He reaches into his wound, slick like the creases

of his wife’s graceful palms when she’s been chopping

tomatoes; he smells basil and earth, while the foehn

wind cradles his darkness away in its arms

and the Slovenian soil catches the spill of his seed.

I had a completely different poem by this poet typed up here from an old print journal I have (amazingly, it had nothing to do with food). I thought I would look at more of her stuff so I headed to her website and went down a small rabbit hole that ended with me falling in love with this poem, so here is another food poem!

Epigraphs--I love them, especially when they are an interesting fact, like Cook provides here.

I am also happy with the point of view she provides here. This is not a persona poem, but her omnipotent speaker shows us an Italian soldier in WWI. He is from Tuscany and he is in what will become Kobarid--we know this from a combination of the epigraph and the insight of the first stanza. We also know he is going to die.

But let's stay with the first stanza for a bit--such luscious descriptions! A kiss, the sun, skin, and his tongue--very sensual stuff. I especially like the last line, which is an allusion to the Catholic Communion wafer, which puts us into church.

And the second stanza continues that mix of church with something else; in this stanza, it is nature. If you don't know:

Ave Maria: "Hail Mary"

gratia plena: "full of grace"

ora pro nobis: "pray for us"

mortis nostrae: "our death"

Amen: word typically used at the end of prayers

The yound man we are following is saying the prayer, Hail Mary. This is very apt, as the prayer asks for help. It is also part of the rosary. Here is the full text: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen"

We find out the exact circumstances of why this man is reciting this prayer in the third stanza's first line: He reaches into his wound. He has been mortally wounded, and that tomato his wife gave him is about to become an odd side-effect of war.

But first, Cook allows us into this man's last thoughts: his wife's "graceful palms" ("Hail Mary, full of grace") preparing tomatoes in their kitchen back home. He smells basil and earth--from home? From where is dying? Yes to both, I think. The wind comes and carries away his soul, but his tomato begins its journey.

I had to look up "foehn": from Dictionary.com, "a hot southerly wind on the northern slopes of the Alps."

And we need to talk about that last line! "Slovenian soil catches the spill of his seed"--all of those "s" sounds, which do two things here, which they do everywhere, but here they are blatant because we have 6 s's in a row. First, "s" is a sensual sound, which harkens back to the first stanza and is also a reminder of the wife. "S" is also an onomatopeia for a number of things, including the air leaving a tire--something deflating, something dying.

Then, the phrase "the spill of his seed." Sensual? Sure. But it is also a reference to the Biblical story of Onan who masturbated and spilled his seed onto the ground (I will let you rabbit hole yourself into that story). It also works here both literally--the tomato--and figuratively--his death has left parts of him in that ground there, "seed" being not necessarily semen but blood, fluids, the corporeal body, and life itself.

You've gotta love a last line that pulls together everything in the poem without hitting the reader over the head. And even when we don't think about a poem deeply, all of this information that the poet put in does seep in. We may not think it, but we feel it. I give you none other than Emily Dickinson to back me up here: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

This wonderful poem was published in The Other Journal. You can find it here.