Tomato in Noonday Sun

The way a tomato plant labors under noonday sun,
her fruit ripening in slow motion.
The flower’s afterbloom becomes a burden,
burgeoning into an expanse of wild color
that is motley green until she molts,
until she transforms, until she learns to bleed,
red, red, red, a color, vivid as a sunset,
but so much sweeter.

The tomato is a gift.

When a tomato bursts between teeth and tongue,
surely some prayer makes peace there.
It is no accident that salivation
looks so much like salvation,
the garden not far from God.
My taste buds respond, enliven, become;
they shout something wordless
yet profound and I no longer know
where the tomato ends and I begin.

Somehow I become the plant that
produced the fruit, become the flower,
still yellow in noonday heat,
become the sprouting bit of hope,
become the seed that began it all,
become even before that,
to the very soil that offered herself to be garden
after a millennia of being free earth.

Perhaps the tomato is a grave,
a reckoning, the addition and subtraction
between which life navigates.
She is algebra that happens within my body,
a native chemistry that lingers, that tells me I am satisfied,
full of sunshine and heat and time
the way a tomato plant labors under noonday sun,
her fruit ripening in slow motion.

~ Alyssa Armstrong