skun tomatoes

Big buckets of steaming water sat
on the grass under the white desert cedar
near the back of the house, next to
half-cases of homegrown tomatoes, with
aluminium or enamelled preserving pans,
and we sat and worked them into the hot water
... red bobbing fruit softening in the stew

But it was the skin we wanted to remove
The reddened stuff shrunk in heat
so the skin cracked like a crazy painting
and tore back in dog-ears and rips
like pages of a well thumbed bible
so that we could skin it off the pulp
sheathing the indigestible covering away
to get to the soft tomato inside.

The skins unzipped to leave naked bodies
of fruit in the baby-flesh, out of its skin
as covered bits undressed after summer
-more like burn-victims in the third degree-
just as we were told 'don;t be such a baby"
"take a look at yourself" and expected
to see inside our surface will and shed
all ego, like skins cracking ego of our faces
to be enabled in life understood as sacrifice
to be digested like decided fates
among the clan of givers and partakers.

the tomatoes were not going to get any graft
as the boilhot skins built up in a discarded fling
while the soggy balls of skun harvest
waited in preserving pans to be packed
in row formations with wooden levers
into rubber sealed Fowlers Vacola jars,
and hot-bottled to good use on the wood stove.

9 December 1996 © Wayne Davdi Knoll
St Joseph’s House of Prayer, Goulburn, NSW