Mato Aleksandra's food illustrations with a serving of poetry

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