Sarah Lindsay's "Zucchini Shofar"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Sarah Lindsay was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and earned her BA from St. Olaf College and MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Mount Clutter (Grove Press, 2002), Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), and Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Carolyn Kizer Prize, and J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize as well as a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she works as a copy editor.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, March 21st, 2025.
0:13.2	Today's poem is by Sarah Lindsay, and it's called Zucchini Shofar.
0:18.4	And it is a poem about fleeting beauties. There's a line early in the poem that asks the
0:27.8	question, shall we measure blessings by their duration? And then the poem goes on to offer an implicit
0:37.3	answer to that poem poem that gloring in these one-of-a-kind
0:43.3	once-in-a-lifetime experiences, not mountaintop experiences literally or figuratively, not necessarily
0:49.8	the summiting of Mount Everest as I have once-in-a- in a lifetime opportunity, but that walk in the woods
0:57.6	down the same path that you always take. But today, the sun falls a little differently through the
1:03.0	trees where the leaves have settled on the path in not quite the same way. Or maybe even the same companions that you usually walk with,
1:13.1	have struck up a conversation today that will never be repeated on future walks.
1:18.6	Also throughout the poem is this sustained musical metaphor,
1:22.4	and then all of these things meet in the final lines for such a perfect image of the incredible, memorable, transporting
1:33.8	experiences that can't be repeated, and really if they could, then they would be diminished.
1:43.3	Here is zucchini shofar. No animals were harmed in the making of this
1:51.2	joyful noise. A thick, twisted stem from the garden is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn.
1:59.5	Its substance will not survive 1,000 years, nor will the garden,
2:04.1	which is today their temple, nor will their names, nor their union now announced with ritual
2:09.7	blasts upon the zucchini shofar. Shall we measure blessings by their duration? Through the narrow organic channel fuzzily come the prescribed, sustained notes, short notes, rests.
2:25.1	All that rhythm requires.
2:28.0	Among their talents, the newlyweds excel at making and serving mustard green soup and molasses cookies
2:33.8	and taking nieces and nephews for walks in the woods.
	...

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