John Sweeney at Literary Review:

The tribulations of Che Guevara, the T-shirt Christ, still continue to fascinate, almost half a century after he was executed in the Bolivian jungle; so, too, continues the hunt for the Judas who betrayed him. A prime suspect has long been the artist Ciro Bustos, who, caught by the CIA-backed Bolivian crack squad sent to track down the Argentinian revolutionary, was accused of providing sketches of his old comrades. A few weeks later, Che was captured and gunned down in cold blood. After a silence over four decades long, Bustos has produced his defence. It makes for a fascinating read, a beautifully written and melancholy tribute to the energy and madness that drove Che to help Castro to overthrow Batista in Cuba and led to his death in Bolivia.

Bustos does something else, too: he writes with real passion about what it was to be a child of the revolution in South America – the excitement, the glamour, the allure of trying to bring down capitalism – in that time as red in tooth and claw as can be.

more here.

Ingrid Robeyns in Crooked Timber:

For a while I have been working on a paper on democracy, expert knowledge, and economics as a moral science. [The financial crisis plays a role in the motivation of the paper, but the arguments I’m advancing turn out to be only contingently related to the crisis]. One thing I argue is that, given its direct and indirect influence on policy making and for reasons of democratic accountability, economics should become much more aware of the values it (implicitly or explicitly) endorses. Those values are embedded in some of the basis concepts used but also in some of the assumptions in the theory-building.

The textbook example in the philosophy of economics literature to illustrate the insufficiently acknowledged value-ladenness of economics is the notion of Pareto efficiency, also known as ‘the Pareto criterion’. Yet time and time again (for me most recently two days ago at a seminar in Oxford) I encounter economists (scholars or students) who fail to see why endorsing Pareto efficiency is not value-neutral, or why there are good reasons why one would not endorse the Pareto-criterion. Here’s an example in print of a very influential economist: Gregory Mankiw.

In his infamous paper‘Defending the One Percent’ Mankiw writes (p. 22):

“Discussion of inequality necessarily involves our social and political values, but if inequality also entails inefficiency, those normative judgements are more easily agreed upon. The Pareto-criterion is the clearest case: if we can make some people better off without making anyone worse off, who could possibly object?”

Yet the Pareto-criterion is not as uncontroversial as Mankiw believes. The Pareto-criterion compares two social states, A and B, and makes a claim about whether the act/policy/social change that brings us from A to B is desirable or not. If in B all individuals have at least the same welfare/utility/wellbeing than in A, and at least one of them has a higher level, then moving from A to B is a Pareto-improvement, and the Pareto-criterion recommends the move from A to B on grounds of efficiency.

More here.

Marshall Sahlins in The Nation:

We were sitting in his office, Ted Foss and I, on the third floor of Judd Hall at the University of Chicago. Foss is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies, a classic area studies program that gathers under its roof specialists in various disciplines who work on China, Korea and Japan. Above us, on the fourth floor, were the offices and seminar room of the university’s Confucius Institute, which opened its doors in 2010. A Confucius Institute is an academic unit that provides accredited instruction in Chinese language and culture and sponsors a variety of extracurricular activities, including art exhibitions, lectures, conferences, film screenings and celebrations of Chinese festivals; at Chicago and a number of other schools, it also funds the research projects of local faculty members on Chinese subjects. I asked Foss if Chicago’s CI had ever organized lectures or conferences on issues controversial in China, such as Tibetan independence or the political status of Taiwan. Gesturing to a far wall, he said, “I can put up a picture of the Dalai Lama in this office. But on the fourth floor, we wouldn’t do that.”

The reason is that the Confucius Institutes at the University of Chicago and elsewhere are subsidized and supervised by the government of the People’s Republic of China. The CI program was launched by the PRC in 2004, and there are now some 400 institutes worldwide as well as an outreach program consisting of nearly 600 “Confucius classrooms” in secondary and elementary schools. In some respects, such a government-funded educational and cultural initiative is nothing new. For more than sixty years, Germany has relied on the Goethe-Institut to foster the teaching of German around the globe. But whereas the Goethe-Institut, like the British Council and the Alliance Française, is a stand-alone institution situated outside university precincts, a Confucius Institute exists as a virtually autonomous unit within the regular curriculum of the host school—for example, providing accredited courses in Chinese language in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

There’s another big difference: CIs are managed by a foreign government, and accordingly are responsive to its politics.

More here.

Stephanie Dutchen in Harvard News:

For decades since the “oncogene revolution,” cancer research has focused on mutations—changes in the DNA code that abnormally activate genes that promote cancer, called oncogenes, or deactivate genes that suppress cancer. The role of aneuploidy—in which entire chromosomes or chromosome arms are added or deleted—has remained largely unstudied. Elledge and his team, including research fellow and first author Teresa Davoli, suspected that aneuploidy has a significant role to play in cancer because missing or extra chromosomes likely affect genes involved in tumor-related processes such as cell division and DNA repair.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers developed a computer program called TUSON (Tumor Suppressor and Oncogene) Explorer together with Wei Xu and Peter Park at HMS and Brigham and Women's. The program analyzed genome sequence data from more than 8,200 pairs of cancerous and normal tissue samples in three preexisting databases. They generated a list of suspected oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes based on their mutation patterns—and found many more potential cancer drivers than anticipated. Then they ranked the suspects by how powerful an effect their deletion or duplication was likely to have on cancer development. Next, the team looked at where the suspects normally appear in chromosomes. They discovered that the number of tumor suppressor genes or oncogenes in a chromosome correlated with how often the whole chromosome or part of the chromosome was deleted or duplicated in cancers. Where there were concentrations of tumor suppressor genes alongside fewer oncogenes and fewer genes essential to survival, there was more chromosome deletion. Conversely, concentrations of oncogenes and fewer tumor suppressors coincided with more chromosome duplication. When the team factored in gene potency, the correlations got even stronger. A cluster of highly potent tumor suppressors was more likely to mean chromosome deletion than a cluster of weak suppressors.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Ga)

Robert Archambeau in Boston Review:

W.H. Auden is a Greek poet, at least when it comes to nature. No, I don’t mean that he is all about olive trees and white sand beaches: I mean there is something fundamentally classical in his attitude toward the natural world, something that puts him at odds with the two dominant modes of nature poetry of our time—something that, indeed, casts light on the outlines of those norms.

The two most common attitudes toward non-human nature in contemporary poetry are the Romantic (or sentimental—if we can use that word without condescension) and the ecopoetic. The first of these dates back more than two centuries, and receives its most powerful theoretical articulation in Friedrich Schiller’s great essay of 1795, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry.” Here, Schiller begins by describing the longing for the realm of nature among self-conscious and sophisticated people:

There are moments in our life, when we dedicate a kind of love and touching respect to nature in its plants, minerals, animals, landscapes . . . not because it is pleasing to our senses, not even because it satisfies our understanding or taste . . . but rather merelybecause it is nature. Every fine man, who does not altogether lack feeling, experiences this, when he walks in the open, when he lives upon the land . . . in short, when he is surprised in artificial relations and situations with the sight of simple nature.

The important thing here is how an encounter with the natural world catches us off-guard, and makes us feel the artificiality of our selves and our ways of going about things. We see how our will and our nature are out of sync, how our social relations and ambitions cause us to do things at odds with our inner nature. When we see the simplicity of a stone simply being a stone, or of water flowing downwards to the sea in accordance with its nature, it has a strong effect on us. We are drawn toward it.

More here.

Ben Goertzel in KurzweilAI:

In 2009, filmmaker and former AI programmer Raj Dye spent his summer following futurist AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo de Garis around Hong Kong and Xiamen, documenting their doings and gathering their perspectives. The result, after some work by crack film editor Alex MacKenzie, was the 45 minute documentary Singularity or Bust — a uniquely edgy, experimental Singularitarian road movie, featuring perhaps the most philosophical three-foot-tall humanoid robot ever, a glance at the fast-growing Chinese research scene in the late aughts, and even a bit of a real-life love story. The film was screened in theaters around the world, and won the Best Documentary award at the 2013 LA Cinema Festival of Hollywood and the LA Lift Off Festival. And now it is online, free of charge, for your delectation.

More here.

Nine Steps To The Shed

Most every morning
it’s out the back door to step,
mug in one hand, curiosity in the other,
down to the first of nine
off-round uneven Caithness slabs
roughly the size and shape of mammoth’s footprints
that stomp across uneven, soggy grass
dividing house from shed,

And it’s true I feel myself following in the bulk
of something vast, patient, fissured —
the deep past, say, or the world yet undeclared —
on this short transition from one dwelling to another.

What’s down there today? A fresh splatter
from passing gull, faint stains of last week’s nosebleed,
the snail lurched sideways in its crunched house,
and something between an image and a phrase that earlier
fell on my bowed head in the shower:
plenty to be going on with!

These stones are split
from the bed of Lake Orcady
that swelled and shrank over these plains,
fresh water, salt, dried up, fresh again, salt,
this happened many times and the stony shades
of shell-fish and minnows now lurk among
the delicate flout of fronds and weeds, squashed
with utter delicacy and irresistible power
by the swaying weight of stars passing overhead
(tiny crunch of that snail in the dark last night),
as the few memories from the vanished
lake of a life are left distorted, flattened,
set in stone as we pause on the way
to the place of reckoning —

So small a place to contain
the vast gone pachyderm, the fossils and the lake,
the trail of stones that led you here
to pause with one hand on the door.
Take a last look at the world you are in,
small fry with time pressing on your neck
even as you bent under the shower’s benediction;
look back at the stepping stones, this staggering line
between one dwelling and the next,
then step into the gloom, the different light.

by Andrew Greig
publisher: First published on PIW, 2008

Francine Prose at the Virginia Quarterly Review:

It’s been almost forty years since I bought an image of Sri Ganesh, the elephant-​headed Hindu god, from a street vendor in the Chor Bazaar—​the Thieves’ Market—​in Mumbai, which at that time was still Bombay. I’ve had the picture, surrounded by a simple black frame and protected by a durable pane of glass, on my writing desk ever since.

When I say desk, I mean desks. I carried the Ganesh with me through the moves and dislocations of my peripatetic late twenties. And later, when I traveled with my husband and two sons to take a succession of visiting-​writer jobs at various colleges and universities, Ganesh’s portrait was among the first things I packed to bring along, the first things I unpacked when I came home. One way to know what you value is to see what you can’t stand to leave behind.

Of course, there’s no “scientific” evidence to prove that I would stop writing completely and forever if I tried to work without the calming, steady gaze of the half-​human, half-​elephant deity presiding over my efforts. But I’m by nature a believer in many garden-​variety superstitions (no open umbrellas indoors, please!) as well as some that are purely of my own invention. I’ve always had a sense about the Ganesh, a feeling that I’ve never been able to shake and never wanted to put to the test.

more here.

Wiam El-Tamami at Granta:

Cairo moved on, as it does, settling into July. I went to stay with my sister. Between my travels and her own and various distances of other kinds, we hadn’t spent much time together in years. As hard as it was to be, it was better to be there, staying up all night, drifting around each other in the rooms; to not have to speak or say or come out of ourselves, to know there is no explanation for now. To just be there, quiet and with her, the wanass of her – a wisp of a word meaning something like this, the consolation of company.

I can’t tell you much about that haze of days, where each one went before sliding thickly into the next. Hours were spent staring into computer screens, eyes like bowls. I suppose we slept, but sleep was something cobbled together from stray hours, after dawn or afternoon, and it didn’t much resemble rest. Things seeped into our dreams.

My sister continued to work; hers was a direct battle against the ugliness. I moved untethered around the house, not knowing what to do with myself, trying to write, to wrangle out some words at a time when I wished above all for silence.

more here.

Jed Perl at The New Republic:

A truly expansive account of postwar American art forces us to see everything in a new light. What has been described as a return to reality in the work of some artists in this show was in fact a continuation of concerns that preoccupied key figures among the Abstract Expressionists, including Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning; at the end of his life Hofmann spoke of once again painting from nature, and de Kooning upset many admirers of his abstract paintings of the late 1940s by switching to figure painting for a time in the early 1950s. A great show about this period would be extraordinarily moving, revealing a heterodox New York School that is hardly even whispered about, except in writings on websites like Painters’ Table, The Silo, and artcritical. The School of New York always delighted in reimagining reality after the experience of abstraction—and vice versa. The clearest expressions of this emboldened double vision included in “See It Loud” are Leland Bell’s daringly simplified, ecstatically colored canvases of two figures in a bedroom, which would be unimaginable without the geometries of Mondrian and Arp, abstract artists revered by many in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. (By the way, I suspect that the later—and greater—of the two Bell bedroom scenes in the show is misdated by as much as a decade. So much for scholarship.)

more here.

Margaret Jull Costa at the Times Literary Supplement:

The Cahiers Series is a collection of beautifully produced booklets (twenty-two have been published so far), around forty pages in length, all illustrated with images, which are sometimes apposite, sometimes not, but always interesting. The declared goal of the series is “to make available new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities”. Some editions have a fairly tenuous connection to translation: in Shades of the Other Shore, two Americans, a poet and an artist respectively, are “translated” from the United States to rural France, with Jeffrey Greene’s short prose pieces and poems exploring “imagined correspondences between personal and historical ghosts tied to the seasons”, and Ralph Petty’s watercolours recording a journey to the source of a local river; in Józef Czapski: A life in translation, the novelist and translator Keith Botsford writes an imaginary autobiography of the Polish author and critic; inIn the Thick of Things, the French architect Vincen Cornu attempts “to ‘translate’ architectural sensation into words and images”. Then there are the cahiers written by translators or by poets who also translate, as well as translations of stories or plays followed by a brief translator’s note.

more here.

Neal Acherson at the London Review of Books:

All cults, in the Bronze Age or today, change emphasis and practice over time. In the later monuments, the early language of ‘supreme sacrifice’ or ‘they died that we might live’ falls away. The delayed wave of war memoirs, poetry and fiction which appeared after about 1928 (Remarque, Sassoon, Edmund Blunden among many others) may have sobered the memorial designers. God also retreats several paces from the iconography, although the graves of the unidentified dead are still marked ‘Known to God’ and the families still write: ‘May God protect you: One of the Best.’

Change has also come to the huge South African shrine at Delville Wood, much of it completed in the apartheid years. There is a new flag, new tablets remembering the Africans who died in Pretoria’s service. More than three thousand white soldiers went into this wood in 1916, and a few days later just over six hundred were still alive and on their feet. The wood, smashed to black spikes, was replanted but its floor is still a crazy pattern of shell-holes.

A Jan Smuts quotation is set in bronze. ‘I do sincerely believe that we are struggling for the preservation, against terrible odds, of what is most precious in our civilisation.’ Few of the women bringing poppy crosses, or the young teachers trying to explain the Thiepval monument to their teenagers, would swallow that, or even understand it. All the same, opinion about the Great War hasn’t moved in a straight line.

more here.

Visi Talik in India Ink:

Q. When did you get into jazz?

In 1995, I was coming out with my first solo album, I was a band leader putting together some great music, I decided to switch from a Ph.D in math and physics to one in the cognitive science of music from the University of California at Berkeley. I took the leap.

People think of it as a genre but for the community of artists there’s really no such a thing. That’s sort of been my experience working with elders from that heritage and from that history. But it’s always been a space for collaboration and creation that is irrespective of marketplace notions of genre.

More here.

To Marina Tsvetaeva

The cold
of a lump of sugar
on the tongue of a cup of tea
of a loaf of bread that leaps
in bloody slices.
The dishwasher’s trade
the genuflections
and hands that are still
being submerged with certain good sense.
The reds
the whites
the skinheads
and Cossacks
might kick down my door
or there may appear a rope
for securing a trunk and hang me
without me shuddering a centimeter

Damaris Calderón
translation: Julie Flanagan
from Poetry International Web

Read more »

Ramachandra Guha in The Independent:

Largely forgotten now are Gandhi's closest friends in South Africa, who were an English couple named Henry and Millie Polak. Henry was a radical Jew, Millie a Christian feminist. They had fallen in love in London, whereupon Henry's family sent him away to South Africa. He met Gandhi in a vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg, and was immediately attracted to the Indian lawyer and his cause. Gandhi, on his part, took it upon himself to have Henry reunited with Millie. When Polak's father claimed that the girl was not robust enough for marriage, Gandhi wrote that if she was indeed fragile, “in South Africa, amidst loving care, a beautiful climate and a simple life, she could gain the physical strength she evidently needed”.

The appeal was successful. Millie arrived in Johannesburg in the last week of December 1905. The next day, Henry and Millie went with Gandhi to be married by the Registrar of European Marriages. The Hindu hoped to bear witness to this union of Jew and Christian; the Registrar thought this was not permitted by law. He asked them to come back the next working day. But the next day was Sunday, and the day after that, New Year's Day. And Millie and Henry had waited long enough already. So Gandhi went across to the office of the Chief Magistrate, to whom the Registrar reported. He convinced him that nothing in the law debarred a brown man from witnessing a European marriage. The Magistrate, remembered Gandhi, merely “laughed and gave me a note to the Registrar and the marriage was duly registered”. The deed done, the couple moved into the lawyer's home on Albermarle Street, where Gandhi lived with his wife, Kasturba, and their four sons. Millie began teaching the boys English grammar and composition, while helping Kasturba in the kitchen. The two women became friends, with the newcomer's buoyant nature overcoming the matriarch's natural reserve and her lack of familiarity with the English language.

More here.

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature:

Amid the mess of US politics — a pointless government shut-down, across-the-board cuts, endless partisan squabbling — now is a good moment to take stock of the fate of publicly funded science. After all, five years ago next week Barack Obama was first elected president, promising that he would “restore science to its rightful place” in US society. How has he done? Pretty well — and the ongoing budget crisis might be the most important reason. When there is no new money to throw at science, the only way to improve its social value is to tighten how the old money is spent. And science policies under Obama are beginning to add up to a strategy to correct the greatest weakness of the US research enterprise: the isolation of the conduct of science from its use in society.

In biomedicine, the doubling of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget between 1998 and 2003 did not reduce the stunningly high failure rates and costs of drug development. To confront this problem, the Obama administration created the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which was approved by Congress in December 2011. Central to NCATS’ vision, says NIH director Francis Collins, are partnerships between “government, academia, philanthropy, patient advocates, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to overcome translational roadblocks and offer solutions to detect, treat and prevent disease”. Despite forecasts of doom, basic science in the United States stands preeminent, as shown by the ongoing harvest of Nobel prizes. But where is the pay-off for the rest of society? The bankruptcy of Detroit in Michigan, once the world auto-industry capital, underscores the need for new science-based technology sectors to create jobs for millions of people, yet it also makes apparent the lack of connection between scientific excellence and economic well-being. To help close this gap, the Obama administration last year created the National Additive Manufacturing Institute. Focused on three-dimensional printing, it is located in the ‘rust belt’ city of Youngstown, Ohio, and was launched with a US$30-million government contribution matched by corporate funds. In May, the president announced three more manufacturing institutes, each to be “a regional hub designed to bridge the gap between basic research and product development, bringing together companies, universities and community colleges, and federal agencies to co-invest in technology areas”.

More here.

Keith Gessen at n+1:

In fact I think Medvedev is Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer. And I’m happy to report that he has returned, in his way, to the Russian literary world—but on his own terms. The Free Marxist Press has expanded—its first full-length book, Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism, translated by Medvedev, came out in 2010, and since then the press has published writings by Žižek, Badiou, the French sociologist and philosopher Michael Löwy, as well as Russian writers on revolutionary history, protest, and the Soviet dissident movement. It has grown in seriousness, prestige, and import, becoming, in effect, post-Soviet Russia’s first independent left-wing publisher, putting out the works of its own people and those sympathetic to it, just as Medvedev calls for in “My Fascism.” In late 2011 it published as a separate book a long, rhyming poem by Medvedev about interviewing Claude Lanzmann, the friend of Sartre and director of Shoah, on a visit he made to Moscow. In 2009 Medvedev founded a rock band, Arkady Kots—named after a Russian poet and socialist who translated the Internationale into Russian—which now plays with more regularity in Moscow and other cities, usually performing the poems of the art-terrorist Alexander Brener set to guitar and drums.

more here.

Maggie Fergusson in More Intelligent Life:

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, Granta, hardback, out now. Winter 1866, and a Scot newly arrived in the New Zealand goldfields stumbles on a motley conclave—opium dealer, card-sharp, cleric—debating recent happenings. One man's dead, another's disappeared, and the local whore has apparently attempted suicide. So opens this 832-page masterpiece, daunting to pick up, impossible to put down. Tale is laid upon tale, and everyone is forced to confront his own darkness. Like a juggler, Catton throws hundreds of balls in the air, and somehow catches them all. Shades of Wilkie Collins and Sarah Waters, but her style is distinct and vigorous. She doesn't so much tell her story as inhabit it, amused by her characters' foibles, yet able to reflect on the human condition with a wisdom normally associated with great age. Eleanor Catton is 28.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, hardback, out now. Robert Harris is unrivalled when it comes to turning complex history into thriller fiction. Here, in a novel faithful to historical fact, he unravels one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice ever known: the conviction of a Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, for spying, and his condemnation in 1895 to a “death worse than death” on Devil’s Island. Told in the first person by Colonel Georges Picquard, who eventually established Dreyfus's innocence and revealed corruption running like rot through the French army, it perfectly captures fin-de-siècle Paris: seedy, febrile and rabidly anti-Semitic. In an eerie foreshadowing of the future Dreyfus travels into exile in a cattle truck. The son of the man who framed him, Charles du Paty de Clam, became head of Jewish affairs in the Vichy government.

More here.

Martha Stewart in Smithsonian:

Isaac Merritt Singer’s Patent No. 8,294 was a vast improvement upon earlier versions, capable of 900 stitches a minute—at a time when the most nimble seamstress could sew about 40. Though the machine was originally designed for manufacturing, Singer saw its domestic potential and created a lighter weight version, which he hauled to country fairs, circuses and social gatherings, dazzling the womenfolk. The $50 price tag was steep, but Singer sold thousands on the installment plan. His machine revolutionized manufacturing and industry, transforming the lives of millions and making Singer a very rich man—a classic American story.

My mother inherited a Singer machine from her mother, and she was constantly sewing—her own clothes, clothes for her three daughters, Halloween costumes for all six of her children, and gifts for friends and family. She kept the machine in a corner of our kitchen in Nutley, New Jersey. My sisters and I started out with small projects like aprons and dishtowels, but we were mostly interested in clothes. I took sewing courses in the Nutley public schools and learned to make a blouse with set-in sleeves and a yoke and collar; a pair of cuffed shorts with a zippered-fly front; and a circle skirt. Mother taught me tailoring, interfacing, bias cutting and how to make bound and handmade buttonholes. These were early lessons in diligence, attention to detail and self-reliance. I kept sewing throughout my college years and made all my fancy clothes from designer patterns I got from my friend’s glamorous aunt, who owned a dress shop called Chez Ninon. I made Balenciaga and Dior and Givenchy and fell in love with couture. I even sewed my own wedding dress with the help of my mother, who assisted with the extensive tailoring.

More here.

36 Reasons Why I Want to Grow a Garden

Because I want to plunge my hands into dark rich soil
Because I want to sweat as I labour over the fork
I want to taste the salt as I sweat
I want to smell hard work on my body
I want my muscles to ache
and then be soothed by soft rain
Because I want the open canvas of tilled land
I want the beauty of level earth, prepared
I want honest calluses on my hands
Because I want to feel the rough sleeping seeds
tumble through my fingers into the ground
I want to smooth them over with a blanket of soft loam
I want to watch the birth of green shoots
as they push themselves towards the sun
Because I want to lie next to the garden listening to the plants grow
I want to smell the earth after rain and after sun
I want to nurture the seedlings into plants
support them with poles and trellises
I want to talk them through their adolescence
Because I want to watch flowers pollinated by bees and butterflies
I want to see the first fruit
smell the sun warmth of a fresh tomato
Because I want to crush aromatic basil plants in my arms
I want to feel the heavy stalks of corn against my body
I want to see my hands stained by the chlorophyll of their existence
I want to watch the plants shine in rising vermilion sun
and glow in the silver of a full moon
Because I want to listen to their chatter as they decide their destiny
I want to harvest the fruit of my labour
I want to relish each individual vegetable shape in my hands
drink their beauty with my eyes
Because I want to feel their unique presence in the world
I want to press them against my face to feel their textures
I want know that when I cook them they will be minutes old
clean of pesticides and pollution
and when I serve them
ripe, brilliant and ready on white china
I want to know that you'll be there

by Jill Battson
from Canadian Poetry Online