An Onion From Poland

No telling who you will meet in cyberspace.
Yesterday, in a truly serendipitous moment, I linked up with a photograph from Truml.com.
One good link deserves another and when I ultimately encountered the phrase nothing but pure onionhood...

Wislawa Szymborska is easier to type than to pronounce. Were she to have come to America during the European mass migration at the beginning of the 20th century, someone at Ellis Island might have stamped her papers "Wallis Sims." But she was much too smart for that to have happened, not to mention too late. She was born in 1924.
Many of her poetry books have been translated into English.
"Wit, wisdom and warmth are equally important ingredients in the mixture of qualities that makes her so unusual and every poem of hers so unforgettable."
-New York Review of Books
In 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature. She died on February 1, 2012.

the onion

the onion, now that's something else
its innards don't exist
nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist
oniony on the inside
onionesque it appears
it follows its own daimonion
without our human tears

our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare to go
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy
in an onion there's only onion
from its top to it's toe
onionymous monomania
unanimous omninudity

at peace, at peace
internally at rest
inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth
the second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth
a centripetal fugue
polypony compressed

nature's rotundest tummy
its greatest success story
the onion drapes itself in it's
own aureoles of glory
we hold veins, nerves, and fat
secretions' secret sections
not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh