Fast Day 216 July 23 2011 {The Price of Apples and Pears}

The Price of Apples and Pears

God was a good gardener
who knew the price of apples and pears
sold in Covent Garden,
planting a plantation full
of pippins in the county Eden
whose produce formed  no small and unimportant part
of the economy of that remote district,
providing fruits for the markets and
making the heart-cheering local
liquors, cider and perry.

Pomological, we the world
are in debt to such a grand gardener;
who taught us soils for the borders of Eden
be light rich loam, friable and crumbling,
such as is met on old sheep-downs,
calculated to grow fine trees and husbandmen
sprung from small portions of
the hereditary deeply laid sands
that form the beaches of blessed
isles within the seas!

There is a season for all fruit
which germinate and wax under the sun:
avoiding extremes, flourishing
between sun and shade, wet and dry;
hardy apples, rich and sweet,
golden pears, sugary and perfumed, ripe and gritty;
berries cockscomb shaped with
pale scarlet flesh and cinnabar
thorns, autumnal bergamot;
all gathered in flat-bottomed baskets
plaited from fragrant reeds.

Earth is the forcing garden,
built of deal timber oleaginous
and filled with resin, disposed with
dovetail joints of paradise:
here we live our accidental lives,
our derangements, hermetically warmed by alembic
alchemy of atmospheric
moistures up and down:
fire above, ashes below;
soon buried in dry sand.

Heaven is a good fruit room
with seven levels of stacked shelves
where lay the apples and the pears
wrapped in dry straw or canvas.
We are all electrical attractions:
walnuts, pine apples, acorn-crested nonpareil,
free from injury by agency
of wasp or moth or ant,
nor flying birds frugivorous
and quadrupeds injurious.

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perry - liquor made from pears

pomological - adjective of the science of fruit or fruit trees (pomus)

frugivorous - fruit eating
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