A Poetic Ode to Moringa: Celebrating National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the United States — a tradition running since 1996, and one of the few observances that asks nothing of you except that you read something slowly. We keep it in our own small way. Once a year we put down the nutrition tables and write about the tree instead.

Moringa deserves the attention. It is a tree that grows ten feet in a year, survives on rainfall that would finish most crops, and produces a green vegetable in dry ground where green things are scarce. In Sri Lanka, where our leaf is grown, it stands at the edges of gardens and along field boundaries — not a specimen plant, just a useful neighbour. Poetry has been made from less.

Ode to a Useful Tree

Moringa oleifera

You were never planted for your beauty.
No one set you at the centre of a lawn.
You went in at the boundary, at the ditch,
where the ground gave out and the shade was gone.

Ten feet in a year on almost nothing.
Pods like drumsticks. Leaves like coins, small change
paid out daily to whoever came.
Nine months from seed to something on a plate.

The women pick you in the early hours,
before the heat comes up across the field,
because the leaf keeps better when it's cool —
this is not romance, it is simply how it's done.

Then shade. Then patience. Then the mill.
And the green stays green, which is the whole trick,
the difference between a careful year
and a fast one. You can see it in the jar.

What arrives is one teaspoon. Grass and pea
and something faintly like the sea.
Not sweet. It was never going to be sweet.
It is the taste of a tree that had to make do.

So here is the ode, and it is a small one,
which suits you. Not a miracle. A method.
A hard tree in a dry place, and hands,
and a kettle, and ten minutes, and a cup.

Why this tree, and not a prettier one

There is a reason the poem above avoids superlatives. Moringa gets called a miracle so often that the word has stopped carrying information. What is actually remarkable about the tree is more specific and more interesting: that it produces an unusually complete leafy green — 47 antioxidant compounds, 25 vitamins and minerals, all nine essential amino acids — in conditions that defeat most vegetables, and that it does so quickly enough to matter within a single growing season.

The rest of what makes a good cup is craft, not botany. Hand harvesting in the cool of the morning. Shade drying instead of heat drying, which is slower and costs more and is the only reason the powder in the jar is bright green rather than the colour of hay. None of that is poetic in itself. It is just work, done carefully, which is a thing worth writing about too.

Your turn

Write us four lines about something ordinary you drink, or eat, or make. Tag us — we read them, and we mean that. Poetry Month is a good excuse, and a cup of caffeine-free moringa tea is a good ten minutes in which to write something down.

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