Poem of the Week: ‘The Tomato Salad’ by Emily Berry

Our poem of the week is ‘The Tomato Salad’ from Emily Berry’s irresistible and life-affirming 2013 debut collection, Dear Boy.

The Tomato Salad

was breathtaking. Sometime in the late 1990s
the Californian sun ripened a crop of tomatoes
to such a pitch you could hear them screaming.
Did I mention this was in California? There was
corn on the cob. She was English and her heart
almost stopped when her aunt served her a bowl
of red and yellow tomatoes so spectacular she would
never get over them. I can only imagine the perfectly
suspended seeds, the things a cut tomato knows
about light, or in what fresh voice of sweet and tart
those tomatoes spoke when they told my dearest
friend, ‘Yosçi yosçi lom boca sá tutty foo twa
tamata,’ in the language of all sun-ripened fruits.

for Lois Lee

Copyright © Emily Berry, 2013. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘The Tomato Salad’ by Emily Berry is featured in Dear Boy.

Read all our poems of the week.