Roy Blount’s “Song to Onions”
January 19th, 2008Save as PDF
Well, in winter’s dreariest hours, food, drink and poetry about food and drink can lift our spirits. Roy Blount was a Sports Illustrated writer when I worked there in the promotion department many years ago. He was a joy to read back then and it turns out he’s still got that down-home way with words that went so well with football. In fact, Blount wrote one of the best football books ever, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, about the Pittsburgh Steelers. And here he is doing for onions what he did for Mean Joe Greene.
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 in 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.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I loved the ‘ Ode to an Onion.’.. :
January 20th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I didn’t know that you worked at SI John! DId you, perchance, know my brother, Whit Tower? He must have left by the time you were there, actually. He mostly covered horses, bu other stuff too in the early days.
I wrote an onion story once, it’s a great subject. Thanks for this one–
Happy New Year to you and Holly! all best, Flora