The Poetry of Watermelon: Sweet Crimson, Summer Smiles, and Sun-Kissed Rinds

August 3, 2020

Today we celebrate National Watermelon Day—a perfect nod to summer’s juiciest delight.

This fruit of picnics, porches, and sticky-fingered afternoons has inspired poets, painters, and writers alike. More than refreshment, the watermelon is a symbol of abundance, simplicity, and fleeting happiness. Nothing evokes August quite like its green rind, red heart, and black seeds scattered like punctuation marks in a hot, lazy day.

Frank Lebby Stanton begins with the kind of invocation that every southerner would echo in the heat of July.

His lines are simple but musical—a call to push away winter’s cold and welcome the bright joy of fruit and sun:

Go along, Mister Winter-
Crawl into your frosty bed.
I'm longing like a lover
For the watermelon red.

— Frank Lebby Stanton, American lyricist

In four quick lines, Stanton distills summer longing to its essence: warmth, color, and the taste of sweetness after months of barren gray. The watermelon becomes the red heart of the season itself—a love letter to July and August.

Charles Bukowski’s watermelon, however, is not just sweet. In his poem, the fruit becomes the vessel for regret, indulgence, and stubborn persistence.

His words, full of self-reproach and humanity, turn the act of eating into an unflinching contemplation of desire:

And the windows opened that night,
A ceiling dripped the sweat
Of a tin god,
And I sat eating a watermelon
All false red,
Water like slow running
Tears,
And I spit out seeds
And swallowed seeds,
And I kept thinking
I'm a fool
I'm a fool
To eat this Watermelon,
But I kept eating
Anyhow.

— Charles Bukowski, American-German poet and novelist, Watermelon

Bukowski’s watermelon is no longer innocent—it’s human. His “false red” slices mirror the strange sweetness of life itself: irresistible, imperfect, and consumed despite knowing better.

The poem hums with late-night heat, quiet confession, and a poet’s resigned honesty.

Charles Simic, ever the surreal minimalist, gives us the most succinct meditation of all.

In just four lines, he reduces the whole experience to a mysterious image, half humor, half revelation:

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

— Charles Simic, American-Serbian Poet, Watermelons

Simic’s “Green Buddhas” are brilliant—a fusion of market and mantra. The watermelon, smiling and serene, becomes an object of quiet enlightenment. To eat it is to take in joy, to spit out trouble.

It’s as if Zen were hiding in a picnic fruit.

The anonymous “Ode to Watermelon” returns us to a more traditional mode of praise, where the fruit reigns as king of the harvest:

Up from the South, by boat and train.
Now comes the King of Fruits again;
Lucious feast for judge or felon,
Glorious, sun-kissed Watermelon;
Green as emerald in its rind,
But cutting through it thou shalt find
Sweetest mass of crimson beauty
Tempting angels from their duty.

— Ode to Watermelon, anonymous

Here, the watermelon is reimagined as both democratic and divine—fit for every table, from courthouse to countryside. The rhyme and rhythm give the verse a vintage American charm, where even angels can’t resist its sweetness.

The most charming prose reflection comes from a South Dakota newspaper, which turns the watermelon into a philosophical wonder. Its anonymous author praises both the taste and the poetry inherent in every slice:

It is pure water, distilled, and put up by nature herself,
who needs no government label
to certify to the cleanliness of her methods
and the innocence of her sun-kissed chemistry.
It is the tiniest trace of earth salts.
It has a delicate aroma.
It is slightly a food, generously a drink, and altogether poetry.
Not altogether is it poetry.
Not in respect of price.
Not even the most hard-working of the poets
can afford to buy the early Watermelon.

— The Citizen-Republican, Scotland, South Dakota, Watermelon

Part sermon, part satire, this 20th-century piece reminds us that the simplest pleasures are also the most sacred ones. The humor tucked among the majesty feels perfectly suited to a fruit that is lighthearted by nature—“altogether poetry,” but with a wink.

And finally, no celebration of watermelon would be complete without the whimsical mention from childhood’s most famous feast.

Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar even makes room for a single juicy slice—one that proves that too much of a good thing can still teach a lesson:

On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of Watermelon.

That night he had a stomach ache.

— Eric Carle, American designer, illustrator, and writer of children's books, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

From childhood snack to poetic symbol, the watermelon’s place in summer is secure.

Whether sung by lyricists, dissected by philosophers, or devoured by fictional insects, it remains joy incarnate—sweet, slippery, and fleeting as August itself.

So today, let us eat the smile, spit out the seeds, and thank the sun for filling our tables (and poems) with such generous red abundance.