DS Maolalai

Cauliflower
 
the leaves are thick
and heavy, callus-hard
as the knuckled hands
on farm-workers,
packed together roughly
in some warehouse
out near Sligo.
rows in wooden boxes,
and each a round
white flower, a gem
on velvet green, faced
up and just visible
as white-green light, balling
in a series of clenching
fists. they are pushed
 
into their boxes,
onto shelves in the dusty
backs of lorries on dusty days
and sent out to supermarkets
and to farmers markets
and roadside stalls
where we buy them, testing
with our fingers
for firmness and tense
fragility, these dead
unopened envelopes,
unseeded and dryly chopped.
 
and we take them home
and chop them further,
driving good steel knives
through vegetation,
tough as knotted muscle
in the thighs of short-haired dogs.
we boil broth soup
with fattish bacon
and handfuls of salt,
 
and feel life
and salt
in our muscles,
fields drying
on dusty days,
sun corrugating
over rows
arranged by the careful
hands of farm-workers,
a series
of knuckled fingers,
each of them
curling up.
 

DS Maolalai has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).