Karina Borowicz's "September Tomatoes"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

Karina Borowicz was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She earned a BA in history and Russian from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. Borowicz spent five years teaching English in Russia and Lithuania, and has translated poetry from Russian and French. Her first collection of poetry, The Bees Are Waiting (2012), won the Marick Press Poetry Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry, the First Horizon Award, and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her second book, Proof (2014), won the Codhill Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Nightboat Press Poetry Prize. Borowicz lives with her family in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

-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. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:09.8	Monday, July 21st, 2025. Today's poem is by New England poet Karina Borowitz, and it's called
0:17.9	September Tomatoes. That's right. I'm on a bit of a tomato kick,
0:22.4	and I'm not sorry. Here's the poem. September Tomatoes. The whiskey stink of rot has settled in
0:32.1	the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises when I touch the dying tomato plants. Still, the claws of tiny yellow
0:40.8	blossoms flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots and toss them in the compost.
0:46.8	It feels cruel. Something in me isn't ready to let go of summer so easily, to destroy what
0:53.1	I've carefully cultivated all these months,
0:55.7	those pale flowers might still have time to fruit. My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her
1:01.7	village as they pulled the flax, songs so old and so tied to the season that the very sound
1:08.8	seemed to turn the weather.
1:18.1	That's right. Those sweet and ephemeral treasures, summer tomatoes, they don't last.
1:24.6	And the time comes where you have to pull them out for the year. And sometimes you do face the prospect of pulling out plants that still have buds on them.
1:36.0	But time is running fast and the idea, the concept of future fruit on those vines is really an illusion. But it's not easy to let go of. So I think this is a poem ultimately about nostalgia,
1:42.7	right? It really carries us backward out of something
1:47.5	really terrible and kind of hellish, this miasma of flies rising up from the dying plants,
1:55.7	the stink of rot as the sugars in the fruits turn to alcohol in the sun. But we end with this
2:03.5	surprising glimpse into the past. The poet's great-grandmother singing with the girls of her
2:11.6	village and pulling flax. This agricultural activity that connects the two women and this golden time that can never be returned to,
2:21.0	but had to happen and pass away for the speaker, the poet, to come about at all, and certainly part of who she is.
2:29.9	And if you're like me, a teacher staring down the barrel of the end of another summer,
2:34.8	then it's also a timely reminder to be thankful for the time that we've had and to let it go gracefully.
	...

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