A Woman Preparing Vegetables

After Vermeer
A woman – quite unknown to me – preparing
Vegetables, is framed within a window:
Has this ever been recorded, made subject
Of a painting, any text, a poem?
It deserves presentation, for here are centuries
Of private, familial, community history,
Of the ordinary in being human – be it
Daily drudgery or welcome expression
Of much else in maternal, wifely, communal,
Other love – all the obvious involvements
That may be expressed in the common task.
Such description, of course, may presuppose
The female role – to some, demeaning
Subservience in expected gender duty – yet
The action takes place in ways, in conditions,
Among lives as various as the thoughts
And feelings in those whose job this is
Or has been – be they loving, bitter, cheerful,
Resigned, abstracted, despairing – all of which
Pass, and now are stilled, resolved, redeemed
In this woman preparing vegetables, seen
In my passing too, and framed now in words.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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