A Sunday Market in Spring

If you've heard of photo journalism, this will be photo poetry or phoetry. All photos by Laurie Easton Parker. This is a walk through the Sunday market with 12 photos. Poem is at the end.

Celebrating one year on Substack. I had hoped to have 100 readers after one year and I have 265, so I’m happy. There’s more readers on Notes, I think, bringing it to 450 but I don’t really understand that stuff much. I almost made it to exactly 200 posts, so I got that going for me too. This next year will be half that.

I had hoped to have more critical response to my stuff, offering detailed edits but people are just too nice, because I know my poetry is not beyond criticism, nothing is, not even John Donne or Thomas Gray. I am nearly done editing my book of 107 poems and have benefited greatly from the comments of my Substack readers and editors. Heartfelt thanks from me to youse guys.

Public Service Announcement. If you don’t like scenes of southern France on market day skip this whole thing. Most people can take only so much beauty per square inch but I am not one of those people. I can take an enormous amount actually, many square feet, with no damage to any part of me. In fact, it makes me giddy.

There’s so much crap and chaos, horseshit and misery going on, this is an antidote.

One year I bought a large piece of very stinky cheese which made for a long week of trying to find places to stash the cheese while I whittled away at it, in self defense. Every photo by Laurie Easton Parker.

These guys last forever and put Slim Jims to shame. Note favorite café in background.

The nougat people tell you that you don’t need to refrigerate it and you can leave it out and it will last for weeks but they lie. It did not last for weeks.

This is another product that lasts a long time. I saw a fly land on our little bowl of olives on the windowsill. Shortly, it crawled off the bowl and died.

The olive lady laughed when I mentioned how much I like the “lovely fall weather.” It’s been chilly and windy, the Mistral winds blowing a lot, one part of the three curses of Provence. The others being Parliament and the Durance River. Haven’t sorted that out yet. But I do remember reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” in French and it was a fantastic story. Also, the Mistral wind beat the hell out of the Chateau D’If, where he was imprisoned. The French often shake their fist when the say “Le Mistral”, like it’s a curse.

Nothing edible here and it’s not in the poem either, but I mean, olive wood cutting boards….. and that big gorgeous building in the background is our bank.

These guys are as good as they look, my darling clementines.

A very small field of green beans surrounded by such color. That geezer could be me.

Look at those lavenders bundles inside wheat and flowers too.

The wisteria has about a two week blooming season. We caught the first of it in early April 100 miles south, on the coast in Cassis, and now we are seeing that last of it up here in L’Isle Sur La Sorgue.

A free range chicken is called poulet au Eden or en Eden, which is an interesting way to describe it.

While here in town I have been able to revisit a particular bunch of roses I met last year. They are doing great and still smell remarkable. I wrote a poem about them called Rose of all Roses, on Substack. There is a bench right next to them for when you get weak in the knees. Here’s that poem below.

I ate the one up front last night. To say it was worth the calories is an understatement. And you can see it winking, clearly.

         A Sunday Market in Spring

           The stalls, first erected
        over five hundred years ago,
   but more recently, just after dawn,
           sit shoulder to shoulder
              for a thousand yards.
        Cheeses, sausage, nougat,
 racks of shirts in this season’s color,
          which is chestnut brown
               veering into copper,
         nowhere near as beautiful
           as these liters of olive oil
           standing golden in the sun,
              which pours down onto
                   this mid April day,
         with a light handed caress,
               as you emerge from
                   a cooling shade.

   Young, beautiful people amble by
     and in the way they hang about,
            draping over that curved
                      bridge railing,
               cannot possibly know
                they rival the wisteria
                  in their momentary
                   but stunning ease.

    The clementines, a vivid orange,
          sit alongside a small field
     of deep green beans, flanked by
           braided bundles of garlic
                  on one side and
          small sheaves of lavender,
              all cleverly trussed up,
                      on the other.

                   Here a chicken,
                plucked and ready
           with his unplucked head 
             tucked under his wing.

                I must find a bench,
                 back in the shade
             or I shall be overcome
      by the olives, black and green.
         Shellacked with egg whites,
            that peach tart glistens,
                  mesmerizing me.
              Surely there must be
             more room in my sack.

               Are those roses real?
      Here are tiny wooden baskets
             of perfect strawberries,
      dangerously close to that giant
                   wheel of cheese
              that could crush us all
              were he to be let loose.

Does that unblemished young person
                      feel like April?
             On this magnificent day,
          and autumn six miles away,
  I can pretend this will go on forever,
                    and it may well.

           Anyone can start a poem,
             but a poet must finish it.
     Could the blossoms stay and stay,
their preciousness would away this day,
     and so we can but weep and pray
    that this memory will keep and stay.