While each grape dreams a dream
of champagne-bubble destiny, figs
turn to honey on the branch. Pumpkins swell,
and melons hoard up sunshine, sprawled
voluptuous on their beds of straw.
There was just enough blue sky to take the photo this morning – yes, figs do sometimes grow vertically upwards, and although they look less appetising, the honey-brown ones that are beginning to wrinkle are the sweetest. The clouds are gathering again, though, so the poor melons and pumpkins are more likely to be ‘bathing voluptuous’ in fields all around the Valle del Tiétar within an hour or so.
To dream a dream, like to die a death, is a Hebraism, and the slightly exotic and very striking idiom has unfortunately been used enough to be a cliché.
You have an image for every fruit – two for the melons (oo-er, missus!) – but the images don’t combine to produce a coherent effect. It reads as a set of entries in a poet’s notebook rather than a poem.
And if I were a pumpkin, I’d sue for equal imagery rights.
“[H]oard up sunshine” would be OK if the melons were consistently presented as misers instead of turning into [i]majas desnudas[/i].
For once, I can’t say I like anything in the poem much, but thanks for the chance to comment on it.
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Thank you – as always – for useful comments.
Much of what is posted here is not poetry, but fragments, notes or works in progress, so all criticism is helpful.
This specific fragment must be some six years old, so perhaps it’s time I did something more/better with it.
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