Your mother may have told you to eat your greens, but I bet she never told you to rhyme them. In 1984 the Collard Festival in Ayden, North Carolina, published a book of odes to collards called Leaves of Greens: The Collard Poems. The taste, the color, the texture, and the lore of collards are celebrated in verse. There are poems about cooking collards, eating collards, planting collards, and missing collards. It is not all a love feast, however. One young poet wrote:
Collards is the worst stuff
I ever swallord!