Poetry Friday: Left-Handed Sugar by Jane Hirshfield

In nature, molecules are chiral - they turn in one direction
or the other. Naturally then, someone wondered: might sugar, built to
mirror itself, be sweet, but pass through the body unnoticed? A
dieters’ gold mine. I don’t know why the experiment failed, or
how. I think of the loneliness of that man-made substance, like a
ghost in a ‘50s movie you could pass your hand through, or some
suitor always rejected despite the sparkle of his cubic zirconia
ring. Yet this sugar is real, and somewhere exists. It looks
for a left-handed tongue.

- Left-Handed Sugar by Jane Hirshfield

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