Potato Remembrances: From Machu Picchu to the Compost Heap

August 19, 2020

Today’s poems gather around one of the humblest of gifts—the potato.

Too ordinary for praise, too common for wonder, and yet, when seen through the poet’s eye, even this soil-born treasure becomes sacred.

The potato, rough and unglamorous, hides its purity underground, living between darkness and nourishment. In its simplicity lies an ancient connection to the earth, to labor, and to gratitude itself.

Joseph Stroud’s “The Potato” transforms a moment of disorientation in the Andes into a quiet revelation about generosity and endurance.

The poet, lost on the Inca Trail, finds his way only through the unexpected kindness of a stranger—and through the simple, wordless exchange of food:

Three days into the journey
I lost the Inca Trail
and scrambled around the Andes
in a growing panic
when on a hillside below the snowline
I met a farmer who pointed the way—
Machu Picchu allá, he said.
He knew where I wanted to go.
From my pack, I pulled out an orange.
It seemed to catch fire
in that high blue Andean sky.
I gave it to him.
He had been digging in a garden,
turning up clumps of earth,
some odd, misshapen nuggets,
some potatoes.
He handed me one,
a potato the size of the orange
looking as if it had been in the ground
a hundred years,
a potato I carried with me
until at last I stood gazing down
on the Urubamba valley,
peaks rising out of the jungle into clouds,
and there among the mists
was the Temple of the Sun
and the Lost City of the Incas.
Looking back now, all these years later,
what I remember most,
what matters to me most,
was that farmer, alone on his hillside,
who gave me a potato,
a potato with its peasant's face,
its lumps and lunar craters,
a potato that fit perfectly in my hand,
a potato that consoled me as I walked,
told me not to fear,
held me close to the earth,
the Potato I put in a pot that night,
the Potato I boiled above Machu Picchu,
the patient, gnarled Potato
I ate.
— Joseph Stroud, American poet, The Potato

What begins as an exchange of travelers and farmers, orange and potato, becomes something profoundly human.

The “peasant’s face” of the tuber becomes a mirror—simple, flawed, but full of sustenance. Stroud’s potato is both compass and companion, grounding him to the earth and to humility. The poem reminds us that the truest nourishment often comes not from grandeur but from the plain generosity of others.

Jane Kenyon’s “Potato” finds another kind of spiritual lesson in this ordinary object—one of guilt, tenderness, and resurrection. After discarding a spoiled potato, she cannot escape its return from the compost heap, as though the earth itself were gently correcting her impulse toward waste:

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been
redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail,
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.
When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the Potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—
looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd's pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.
— Jane Kenyon, American poet, Potato

Kenyon’s resurrected potato haunts her—refusing decay, refusing disappearance.

The compost becomes both grave and cradle, and the potato returns like a moral messenger. The poem suggests that even what we discard carries life, waiting patiently in the dark to be renewed. In Kenyon’s hands, the potato becomes a teacher of humility and regeneration, its “plumper, firmer” return a quiet miracle of persistence.

Together, these two poems, far apart in landscape and tone, converge beautifully.

Stroud’s potato is a token of kinship—a reminder of the world’s vast but tender generosity.

Kenyon’s is a humbler resurrection, a symbol of responsibility and rebirth.

Both remind us that what is plain—what is buried—is sacred. In every meal, in every garden, even in the smallest root, there lives the great lesson of the earth: that everything returns, and everything feeds us again.