Nahomi Shihab Nye's- The Traveling Onion

“The Traveling Onion,” is a poem written by Nahomi Shihab Nye which, on the surface, tells the tale of not only the onion that she cooks with, but also the life that all onions live. Now, others swear that the poem is talking about more than just an onion; however, my imagination has only stretched so far as to recognize the onion.

Nye was feeling very compassionate for the onion that she had used in stew the night that she wrote “The Traveling Onion”. That is, if she actually did make a stew that day, as she talks of in her poem.

She uses such words and phrases to describe the nature of the onion that I actually felt sorry for not having given the vegetable more credit earlier! It is clear that Nye feels that people do not give onions the glory that they deserve. At mealtime, she says, we comment on the “texture of meat or herbal aroma but never on the translucence of an onion” (Nye).

            Nye does well to get her point across that she will not downsize the beauty of an onion. She does not want them to be “something so small and forgotten” (Nye). Nye writes, “When I think how far the onion has traveled/ just to enter my stew today/ I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles.”

These small and forgotten miracles are so abundant that we often over look them; however, we could praise even the miracle of the onion plant sprouting from a seed. We could praise the plant bearing the onion for its own sake and ours. We could praise the safe and unharmed travel of the onion from its home to ours. Nye talks about the onion’s history when she writes, “the way knife enters onion and onion falls apart on the chopping block, a history revealed”. Onions are composed of “pearly layers in smooth agreement”. Their layers tell of the history of its growth.