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      February 1, 2022DecaySara Sethia

      Suffering and happiness, they are both organic, like a flower and garbage. If the flower is on her way to become a piece of garbage, the garbage can be on her way to becoming a flower.
      —Thich Nhat Hạnh

      I don’t remember why I left
      a half-cut tomato,
      inside a plastic box
      in the school locker but
      when I returned to it
      a week later, it was melting
      soft, its red disappearing
      into foamy white silver—is this
      how the moon would look
      from my window when she’s dying?—
      fungi.
       
      The teacher held the box
      on her palm and decided
      to show us, a class of five
      neatly-lined dahlias, the tomato rot
      under a microscope.
      So, we pranced to the lab
      and queued behind the grey
      microscope’s arm. I in the end,
      without the rush of another body,
      pressed my eye against the microscope’s—
      the fungi, o the beautiful
      love-making fungi, rising
      from tomato soil,
      the way sunflowers rise
      from grandma’s
      rot.

      from Poets Respond

      Sara Sethia

      “Three days before Thich Nhat Hanh passed away, I was listening to his conversation with Krista Tippet on her show, On Being. During the conversation, when he spoke about death and suffering, my mind wandered to the time—12 years ago—when I had left a tomato to rot and a week later, had stood in the school lab, holding the rotten tomato, wondering why the beautiful white fungi over the tomato was called by a word so harsh as ‘rot.’ That night, the 11-year-old inside me, slept peacefully after learning from Thich Nhat Hanh that decay, suffering and death were intimate manifestations of life itself.”

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