(To my wife, Linda)
Its afternoon with pavement stalls
The air is rent with fruiterer’s calls,
“Strawberries plump at prices fair”
“From pocket or purse, if need be share.”
Curvaceous housewives,
With eyes alight
Stop and gaze
At the scarlet sight,
This benevolent spouse
Despite the cost
Pays up for the punnets
The battle is lost!
The fruits are borne away like rubies,
They really are such succulent beauties.
Proud of the bowl with sugar and cream,
They look, in the home, like a snowcapped dream.
An apostle spoon,
And the mount is demolished,
She pouts her lips
‘Til the glassware is polished.
Happily full….
She rests – the chair sighs
There’s a hint of the Lisa
As she closes her eyes.
The flow of the juice
Laps into her senses,
She dreams in a world
With no present tenses.
Back to the past
Where her men were fair,
Back to one,
For whom she really did care?
The berries and beet
and the creamy white
Drift her deeper and deeper
into nostalgic “night”.
Her years fall away
in this sensuous sleep,
She slumbers in girlhood
free and replete.
The produce of Bacchus
at best, without flaw,
Can surely not equal
these fruits of the straw.
