The Fruit of the Misunderstood...Magpie 22

Born from the earth and ripened on the vine, your fleshy internal segments, envelope your watery matrix. Contained within it, your slippery seeds which fall upon the earth. They tuck into your native South American land, from whose rich soil, you were birthed.

A Cortez discovery, in Montezuma’s garden, no longer a hidden treasure.
Your harvested seeds taken to a new land and planted there you rise suspiciously in your foreign home. Out of the European soil your stems and leaves reach...dense with their glandular-hair...like sprawling arms out-stretched, from which your sprouting berries hang.

You were erroneously defined by your botanical beauty...a poisonous child of the night shade clan. Judged on your bright and shiny appearance. Judged on your herbaceous heritage. Your ornamental curiosities, thought not for consumption.

The tragedy of the lost years...you were not received and devoured...not welcomed to their banquet tables. Recognized only for your outward beauty, they denied their palettes of your wonder.

They picked you not ripe from the vine. They tasted not the sun's warmth bathed within your flesh. They tempered not your acidity and bitterness with the flame's heat, to seduce your subtle sweetness.

Rather their ignorant tongues sprouted warnings of danger, mistaking you for the poisonous wolf-peach. Tintilating tales emerged from their lips, of your aphrodisiacal powers.

Pommes d'amour, love apples...pomi d'oro, yellow apples, oh the names you have been called. The fear you have instilled, the tales you have evoked, the passions you have exploited, ovarian fruit hanging heavy on the vine.

Your inner beauty deliciously discovered, through time and understanding.
Join us now at our table we are privileged to welcome you.

© Copyright 2010 Christine Maxwell
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