An Onion that can make you cry

I went to visit another of my clients this afternoon. His name is Robert Fine and he needed me to help him with some of his paperwork that had been building up. He has MS and is confined to his wheelchair. He appologized again and again for asking me several times where I lived. "Short term memory loss is one of the side affects of my condition," he told me.

Later, after we were done with his paperwork, I guess he wanted to show me that despite his condition, he was very much still alive. He proceeded to recite to me Pablo Neruda's "Ode To The Onion." Neruda, Chilean writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was born about a century ago.

Here's the entire poem he recited to me from memory.

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

The End.

When he stopped reading, it was hard for me to not cry. But not because I felt bad for him, but because of how he impressed me. I don't think I will look at an onion the same ever again.