The Splendor of the Tomato: Neruda’s Ode and Northerns’ Good Tomato

July 29, 2020

Today’s poems celebrate one of summer’s most luscious icons—the tomato—both in its sensual abundance and its cultural symbolism.

No other fruit quite captures the spirit of midsummer the way a tomato does: sun-warmed, fragrant, bursting with sweetness and sharpness in equal measure. It is as much a staple of the kitchen as it is a metaphor for passion, pleasure, and the passing heat of a season—or a life.

In his famous “Ode to Tomatoes,” Pablo Neruda transforms the simplest of ingredients into a radiant hymn. With his typical generosity of spirit, he celebrates not just the fruit itself, but its place at the center of ordinary joy—the table, the meal, the shared act of eating under light and warmth.

The street
filled with tomatoes
Midday,
Summer,
light is
Halved
Like
A
Tomato,
its juice
Runs
through the streets.
In December,
Unabated,
the tomato
Invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
Takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
Sinks
into living flesh,
Red
Viscera,
a cool
Sun,
Profound,
Inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
We
Pour
Oil,
Essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
Adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
Parsley
Hoists
its flag,
Potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
Recurrent
and fertile
Star,
Displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
— Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet & Nobel Prize winner, Ode to Tomatoes (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

Neruda’s tomato is no mere garnish—it is “the star of earth,” life embodied in flavor and color. He describes it as both a sacrifice and a celebration, turning an everyday salad into a ritual of gratitude.

The tomato bleeds and blesses alike, offering itself to summer’s table in what he calls “the wedding of the day.” In his hands, food becomes poetry, and poetry becomes nourishment.

Centuries after the tomato first reached Europe’s gardens, another poet found in it new meaning—and a new kind of irony. Janice Northerns’ poem “Good Tomato” grows from the slang of an earlier era, when “tomato” was a term used for women, often with objectifying overtones.

By weaving in authentic tomato varietal names, Northerns turns that language inside out, reclaiming the metaphor with wit and sensual power:

She took the purity pledge (Sweet Baby Girl,
Super Snow White, Artic Rose),
fled the grasp of Big Beef and Better Boy
on a Southern Night and, baptized
in hydroponics, gleamed waxy
and vapid under a fluorescent gaze.

 

She was a good girl (Beauty Queen, Gum Drop,
Mighty Sweet, Sugar Plum, Pink Champagne),
a tidbit on the tip (Flaming Burst, Solar Flare,
Razzle Dazzle, Roman Candle)
of his tongue (Lucky Tiger, Top Gun,
Tough Boy, Sun King).

She was Plum, Pear, Grape, and Cherry,
because one thing is always like another—
like a wad of chewed-up gum, tasteless
and shriveled on the marriage vine
and gave it away too soon.
She was a Jezebel (Shady Lady,
Spitfire, Perfect Flame),
hot to the touch, steeped in dark earth,
sun-soaked, bright tang bursting
in the throat. A little dirt
on the tongue never hurt anyone.
— Janice Northerns, poet, Good Tomato

Where Neruda’s tomato ennobles the sensory, Northerns complicates it.

Her poem ripens with wordplay and social insight—the humor edged with critique, the imagery lush but sharp.

By merging the vocabulary of horticulture with the coded language of femininity, she cultivates a poem that’s both earthy and subversive, as daring as the very fruit it names.

Both poems remind us that the tomato, like summer itself, resists simplicity. It is sacred and sensual, silly and solemn, domestic and divine.

In July, when the vines hang heavy and the air tastes faintly of ripeness, the tomato stands as both harvest and metaphor—a red emblem of life’s ripe impermanence, to be savored as long as the light lasts.