Stunning food illustrations by Volgograd-based artist Mato Aleksandra, paired with delicious food poems:
This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Willliams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Figs by D.H. Lawrence (Excerpt, read the full poem here)
The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
(Excerpt. Read the full poem here)
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
haiku by Matsuo Basho
Translated by Robert Hass
Coolness of the melons
flecked with mud
in the morning dew.
What Is Given by Ralph Murre
The likelihood of finding strawberries tiny and wild and sweet around your ankles on any given day in any given place is not great but sometimes people find strawberries right where they are standing just because it is their turn to be given a taste of something wild and sweet
Follow Mato's work on Instagram @mato_aleksandra or her website https://matoaleksandra.com