First fruits

This is just to say  (William Carlos Williams)  

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

Biting into the first plums of the season this month, I could not help remembering this poem by William Carlos Williams and being overcome, as well as by the flavour of the plums, by the desire to pass this poem on. So here you are.

You can read more poems by this bespectacled doctor from New Jersey who was a friend of Ezra Pound and an inspiration to Allen Ginsberg on the Poetry Foundation website   -- which if you like poetry you should know about anyway -- where you can also hear Library of Congress recordings from the 1940s of WCW reading his poetry aloud, including the famous "The Red Wheelbarrow", which has a special meaning for me, in as much as hearing it dissected at University in a Modern American Literature class made me forswear an academic career forever --  I might even say that had it not been for "The Red Wheelbarrow", I would not today be the person I am.


From the library:

 -- Random House's  William Carlos Williams from The Voice of the Poet series is a 1 hour CD of WCW reading his poetry and an accompanying book with the texts of the poems

 -- WCW's Collected poems in two volumes

-- The William Carlos Williams Reader edited by M.L. Rosenthal