Ellora Sutton

On lemons (fertility and submission)

I want to quote Neruda on lemons
but I don’t like what he wrote about the body of a woman
(or how W.S. Merwin translated what he wrote about the body of woman).

How can the man who saw a whole cathedral in a sliced lemon
write about a woman as if she were a tomb and not a planetarium?

*

O Neruda, if I am a word it is not melancholy
but moonlight. Translation is hard, I get it,
especially when the subject is as fluid as perception,
your perception of me: sad, sad, sad doll. It’s true:
my hands are always cold, and you shrink from my coldness
like a memory from a therapist, the way a cat shrinks.

*

You are dead,
and you write like a dead thing.
Is it beautiful?

Yes, damn you.
It is beautiful.

Ellora Sutton is a poet based in Hampshire. Her work has been published by The Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, and Propel, amongst others, and she reviews for Mslexia. Her pamphlet Antonyms for Burial (Fourteen Poems) was the Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice, and her latest pamphlet, Artisanal Slush, was recently published by Verve.

Ellora wrote the following about her poem:

I love baking. I especially love baking with lemons — the way their smell fills the kitchen, widens the kitchen, makes it easier to breathe. So I decided I wanted to write a poem about lemons. I love the research part of writing, and I started reading what other poets have written about lemons. Pablo Neruda has a gorgeous poem called ‘A Lemon’, with the most enchanting imagery. So I wanted to write a lemon poem referencing that. But then I picked up a book of Neruda’s love poems, and I didn’t like the way he wrote about women, and then I couldn’t separate that from his beautiful lemon poem, and then — well, that’s all I could write about. How a man might respect a lemon more than he respects a woman, and the complexities of feeling that evoked in me, as a woman. I wanted to prove Neruda wrong.