Poemattic: Poetry and Art for the Soul

A Supermarket in California (An excerpt) by Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I  walked down  the side streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the Neon fruit  supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! – and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing  down by the watermelons?

Allen Ginsberg was The Beat Poet. The Beats especially Allen Ginsberg painted a dark picture of their truth about American life in the years after WWII. “Ginsberg and his friends believed that spiritual life was essential to a person’s existence: Beat is short for beatific or holy.”