The Poetry Stash: 21Feb2024

The Beauty of a Busted Fruit by Natalie Diaz

Today’s poem is “The Beauty of a Busted Fruit” by Natalie Diaz from the collection When My Brother Was an Aztec. The book is available for purchase here.

The Beauty of a Busted Fruit by Natalie Diaz

When we were children, we traced our knees,
shins, and elbows for the slightest hint of wound,
searched them for any sad red-blue scab marking us
both victim and survivor.

All this before we knew that some wounds can’t heal,
before we knew the jagged scars of Great-Grandmother’s
amputated legs, the way a rock can split a man’s head
open to its red syrup, like a watermelon, the way a brother
can pick at his skin for snakes and spiders only he can see.

Maybe you have grown out of yours—
maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you
onto every bus, through the side streets of a new town,
maybe you have never set them rocking in the lamplight
on a nightstand beside a stranger’s bed, carrying your hurts
like two cracked pomegranates, because you haven’t learned
to see the beauty of a busted fruit, the bright stain it will leave
on your lips, the way it will make people want to kiss you.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “When we were children…”
2.	Begin with “you haven’t learned…”
3.	Explore “scars”: their definitions/origins/consequences. Note how the word functions as a noun and a verb.
4.	Describe a person, a moment, an object that you think is beautiful/valuable, but others do not OR describe something/someone that others judge as beautiful/valuable but you think otherwise.
5.	Write a draft in which the title is also a line in the poem.

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