Please enjoy today’s selection: “Plums” by Mariano Zaro, which appears in The Poeming Pigeon – Poems about Food:

Plums

My father wraps plums with newspapers.
I cut the pages in half. He wraps the plums.
We are in the attic. It’s summer.
We don’t talk. He rolls the fruits,
his fingers twist both ends of the paper.

It’s raining outside.

The plums look like wrapped candy.
He is meticulous, not too meticulous, just enough.
The plums have to be without nicks or cuts,
firm, not too ripe, unblemished.

The storms have been coming all afternoon.
That’s why my father is home;
he couldn’t go to the fields.

He ties the plums with a thin string,
like a necklace.
Five plums in each string, exactly five.
I don’t know why.
His hands inspect the fruit, twist the paper,
tie the knots, do the math.
I hide my hands under the newspapers.
He is on a ladder now.
He hangs the strings from a wooden beam in the ceiling.

I pass the strings to him.
One by one.
Sometimes, unintentionally,
my hand brushes his hand.
He leans his body against the ladder,
rests for a moment, cleans his sweat.

My father is old.
The strings dangle from the ceiling.
Plums in-waiting like dull,
modest Christmas ornaments.

Fruit for the winter, he says.
As if you could wrap the summer with newspapers.
As if you could wrap your father’s hands
for the future days of hunger.

The post Poem of the Day (04-27-2018) appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Decoding Sparrows

My father and I on the balcony
watch dozens of sparrows walking
on the roofs across from us.
A sparrow doesn’t really know how to make a nest, he says.
They are messy. Now, a stork, that’s different.
A stork makes a perfect nest.

My father looks at the clouds.
Can you tell a male from a female sparrow? He asks.

No, I can’t. I say.

Look, male sparrows have a dark stain on the chest,
like a bib or an apron. Females don’t.

And I look,
and there they are:
chests with aprons, chests without aprons.
Everything in order.
Clean or dirty,
black or white,
male or female.

I cross my arms against my chest.
My father does not look at me.
And then he says,
But we are not sparrows, you know.

The post Decoding Sparrows by Mariano Zaro appeared first on The Poetry Box.