The bowl
by Samuel Sun, Wesley College Melbourne
Years 7 – 8 Performance Poetry Finalist
When I was born,
They placed a bowl before me
It wasn’t silver, It wasn’t beautiful, It wasn’t sacred, It was a simple bowl
A bowl that you and I may have used everyday.
Inside was an apple and a pomegranate
I was young. I was stupid. I was absent minded
So I chose the apple.
It looked the most glamorous, the most pretty.
Its bright red glistening in the sunshine
reaching for me like a glisten of hope,
Like a crack of sunlight in a world of shadows and pessimism.
I bit into it, a sugary sensation
A sensation that was tranquil, that brought me peace
that brought me deep nostalgia for a life I never had.
Then I tasted something,
Something soft, something odd, something repulsive
In the very core of the apple, it was rotting, dying.I stopped.
Why would such a beauty,
a perfect looking aesthetic have such a facade.
Once again, I turned back to the bowl and took out the pomegranate.
I peered its weathered crown open,
Rubies spilling out onto my hand
Each seed a tiny heartbeat, a stolen sunset
I tasted one. Sweet
Another: Bitter
Another: Sweet again.
Each of the crimson rubies were slightly different, slightly varying.
Why?
I looked down.
The bowl was almost empty.
Peels curled like fallen leaves.
Juice had dried into stains,
Something inside me went cold.
I had spent my entire life choosing
as though the bowl would wait forever.
But it wouldn’t.
It was never asking,“Which fruit is perfect?”
It was asking, “Will you reach?”
Will you reach when beauty deceives you?
Will you reach when sweetness hides a stone?
Will you reach when your hands are shaking,
when the next choice might wound you,
when you cannot see what waits beneath the skin?
Because there is no second bowl
There is no untouched morning waiting beyond this one.
There is no second pair of hands
coming to make the choice for you.
Because this is the clay.
This is the hunger. This is the life that was placed before you.
So reach
Reach with your trembling fingers.
Reach through the darkness.
Taste what is sweet.
Taste what is bitter.
Spit out what has rotted,
but do not throw away the bowl.
Because one day, the bowl will be empty. And it will.
And when that day comes, let its clay be stained with fingerprints,
scarred by every choice, marked by every fruit you dared to touch.
Let it be ugly. Let it be broken. Let it bear the evidence that you were not afraid of living.
Because I would rather hold a shattered bowl that remembers everything
than a perfect one, that remembers nothing.