Beginnings
for Hannah
I thought you’d start as hard green balls
generic fruit-ness, the butt-end of blossoms
hardening into a pip, a bulge
indistinguishable: apple, plum, peach
but no. From that first moment
when flower transforms to incipient fruit
you are yourself, that bell-shaped curve
inimitable, announcing to the world,
to any passing bee, wasp, human:
pear. I am pear. Miniscule
ur-pears, tiny bubbles of peardom
reflections in a Christmas bauble,
a green jay glimpsed through the small glass
of binoculars, unreachable,
self-contained as an unborn thought,
needing only sun and time
to become the fruit you always were:
Bosc, Comice, Seckel – names that tinkle
like childhood, spice on the tongue.
Judy Barisonzi
A poem in the Poetry at the Market program
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