The Souls of Tomato Folks
Poem by Sonia E Barrett (2021)




Tomatoes sat together

Content, fat, juicy

Full of their own seeds and

Skin perfected by the sun




Their support structures have grown with them

always just strong enough to let them hang together

So they were not tethered

nor hanging on




Those structures getting thicker and stronger

as they filled out

and gained their colour.




A collective from the start




We sense these different lifeforms

Humans who have organised their lives around moving

Forgetting to hang out and fatten

Forgetting their support structures

that don’t grow with them.




They are tethered

or hanging on.

Their bruises somehow not visible




Very bruised




Bleeding or squirting their seeds

Organising their lives around skin colour

which fails to change.




We drop and nourish the earth

sometimes humans are an alleyway to the soil first.




Our ethos and skin undigested.










Damaging Tomatoes.




Whichever way you damage me

My seeds will out

Capsuled in life-giving goblets

My seeds will be together

joined by

Smooth but persistent

barely visible bonds




When you pull me from my brothers and sisters

The memory of the vine is a scar or a crown

when I take some or none of the vine with me




You have to boil and slit my skin off of me

If not

My skin, my skin is so troublesome

Stuck in teeth at dinner parties

Curling and refusing

Disintegration

Digestion







Or if your kitchen is aspirational

(Maybe German), it’s equipped.

You can blend my skin off me

Homogenize me till I am utterly pulped

A thousand rotated cuts

That will do it.













The Wrong Soil




The tomato grows in England

And in the Caribbean




My grandmother’s London garden had scallion

Which grows there and here




All the other vegetables I love

Don’t root both places.




When I dug up the potatoes

It felt good

Then the feeling welled up in me

But what if it had been a yam tho?




I realised I was hoping for a yam

Which is manic

as I had seeded potatoes

watered potatoes  

and heaped up the soil on potatoes

For months




Perhaps this is a second-generation Immigrant’s

mental harvest




My Grandmother’s complaint

retired back home that she cannot grow roses.




The shelves are bare

I need food not roses




It took a lockdown garden

For me to realise




And fully sense

I am in

the wrong soil



















Doing the bidding of tomatoes (they/them)




I wait for them to be ready to descend

And when they do

I wait for them to intuit to me

E a t me

Then I do

I pay attention to their journey

All the while listening, attending

to where they want me to be

When I pass them on




When they reach that point

I make sure I am there.













Preserving tomatoes or

When tomatoes matter




Recline together under

A gentle constant reliable heat

For hours and hours




Together with companion plants




No agitation




Till all are fully

languidly

almost unrecognisably

relaxed




Then guide them carefully in groups

To a clean, uncontaminated, contained space




Add a decadent oil




Enough to enable free

and effortless movement

In the clean, uncontaminated, contained space.