Peach Blossoms

A poem on the orchard blossoming inside you—even on the gray days.

Adriaen Coorte, Two peaches and a fritillary butterfly on a stone plinth, ca. 1680

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Friends,

If I’m honest, it’s been a tough few days. After an intense week at work and home, I’ve drifted into depression. Ironic since Lindsey and I had such a full and lovely weekend. We ate out at a new restaurant, spent a morning in a coffee shop, wandered a bookstore, went on a neighborhood walk, had the best deli sandwiches ever, and we saw Art in Bloom where people made gorgeous flower arrangements to respond to artworks….It was a weekend for the books! And yet, I mostly felt flat and gauzy the whole time. Like I was watching a world just out of reach.

Li-Young Lee’s poem below has been a favorite for years. There are times I feel that joy he expresses in the poem, but this is not one of those times. I had planned a triumphant conclusion to this month of reading metaphysical food poems (radishes! grapefruit! tomatoes! onions!), but truthfully I don’t have much to offer other than to say “hey check out this poem! It’s a good one.”

It’s fitting in a way, since one purpose of poetry isn’t to recite it from a summit of spiritual fulfillment but to read it in the doldrums, to be reminded of states of being even when you’re not experiencing them in the moment. Maybe that’s how you’re feeling too. So this week when I return to Li-Young Lee’s poem, I hear a voice speaking from the other side of gray days saying: keep cultivating your open heart, one day at at time.

Take care,

Michael

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“From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

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.

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From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

This poem doesn’t start at roadside stall—it starts with blossoms. In both title and first line, Li-Young Lee wants to be sure you’re not just thinking of peaches in a plastic bin at the grocery store, or peaches on a table, but peaches plucked out of a cycle of growing and living and dying—a cycle we all share. It reminds of Dylan Thomas’ who wrote, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; / that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.” Only here, the poet faces cycles of life and death with open-hearted warmth instead of anxiety. Yes, there is death (spoiler alert) but there are also flowering life.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

There’s a lot of history and ecosystems that made that peach possible: the water, the tree, the nutrients in the soil, the weather, all the complex lives of the people who picked the fruit and prepared it for sale—it’s all there in the first bite. It’s enough to make your head spin. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls this “interbeing,” the deep and unavoidable interrelationships that make all life possible. This is a “sweet fellowship” we all share, and for the poet, stopping to eat a piece of fruit is an opportunity to let his mind wander toward all these relationships that made this nourishment possible.

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.

The poet keeps returning to the same moment—eating peaches at a roadside stall—and launches from descriptive to metaphorical language. He doesn’t just imagine the peach orchard but also the “orchard” we carry within us, a living ecosystem not just of organs but also days—all the memories and histories and daily living that slowly accumulates into our own identities. Li-Young Lee’s language is practically devotional here: love, adoration, jubilance. It’s not just about eating a yummy snack—a chance moment on a road trip leads this poet into a posture of open-hearted gratitude for being alive. When is the last time you felt that? When is the last time I felt that? How do we cultivate that sense of gratitude?

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.

And here is where the poem takes its poignant turn, and the key word is “as if.” As if death were nowhere to be found. But of course, death is an unavoidable part of life, and the very fact of naming it (even in negation) brings the subject of death into this poem celebrating life. Joy to joy, blossom to blossom, this sense of gratitude is brought into clear focus by a sense of impermanence. There are days where death feels like it’s in the background, and there are also days when it definitely feels like it’s front and center. For this poet, the sheer impossibility of life itself needs to be named and celebrated regardless—that we are here breathing on this earth, that we can experience moments of joy together, that we carry memories of our lives and loved ones with us wherever we go.

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How to get into poetry

Kathleen Ryan’s luxurious sculptures of rotting fruit

Li Young Lee on poetry and consciousness

What makes a poem….a poem?