PAUL GREEN
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
An apology to oranges
I’m sorry,
that I picked you
out of the fruit bowl, slammed
you into the opposite wall like a fast bowler
spilling a meteorite at the pledge of his most adamant
opponent, like a duped knuckleball thrusting a comet to implode
a shadow from the fingers’ vows.
On breaking the vacuum
it hung there for a moment,
as if trying to comprehend what to do
with its split sphere. Perhaps, it was scared too? Knowing
that punctured footballs get kicked
to rot away in a marriage of stagnant canals.
There was its store of sun, seeping
across the wall
and when I looked down
I could see my finger holds, like thick grooves in a railing,
could see the waxy sheen and delicate perforations on its skin
and my first thought was, what a waste of perfectly good fruit
and my second, that I will never taste orange again.
Paul Green has worked in nature conservation/environmental management for over thirty years and lives in rural Lancashire, UK. He has published various environment/nature papers/reports and recent poetry/fiction in The Curlew, The Fiction Pool and Tears in the Fence.
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Very good!