The farmer tells me

these flowers grow beans, 

fava beans, but I would 

never have guessed, seeing them massed 

as high as my shoulders in the field.

They are inscrutable zebras of flowers:

Black calligraphic lines feathering

like veins and capillaries

behind black inkdrop eyes

on a startled field of white.

They are the unexpected flowers

the not-conventionally-beautiful flowers

poised atop broad square-edged

muscular stems and spiky 

workmanlike leaves.

"Take some," the farmer says, handing me 

a few stems. "You'd be helping us," 

she says, for the tall favas

are shading and crowding 

the radishes below. 

But when I read about 

fava beans, later at home

I learn that these are regal beans,

not nuisance but lifeline.

These beans saved the Sicilians

from famine. They reliably

fill bellies from Colombia

to Croatia, Spain to Sudan. 

They are as much blessings

as beans.