Pear, by Paisley Rekdal

What a lovely poem.

I always enjoy works (poems mostly, I guess) that describe a thing by telling you what it is not.

This is not the fruit

 

that will send you to hell

nor keep you there;

it will not give you knowledge,

 

childbirth, power, or love;

And of course the defiance - or may just self-assuredness, fearlessness, resolve - at the end makes me sing:

I'll eat

what I like and throw the rest

to the grasses.

And now, re-reading this two months after I last read it (which is, apparently, two years after I first read it, according to my notes), I'm noticing for the first time the headnote (what do you call that thing? StackExchange says it's an argument, or a headnote), "after Susan Stewart."

So now I have to go find the Susan Stewart poem:

Pear, by Susan Stewart

That's pretty great - so different! - but I confess I like Rekdal's poem more.

Image of pears from Wikimedia, user Rhododendrites, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Thank you, Rhododendrites!