Learning How to Be Bad Again, The Illustrious Mango

To my surprise, ahead of my self-imposed schedule is the first poem from the Poem-a-Month series—a simple rhyming ode to mangoes, one of the few fruits I have found I like since embarking on my goal to add more fruit to my diet. I bought a mango for the first time in my life a few weeks ago, and I didn’t know how to slice it. I had to look it up on YouTube.

The hardest thing for me about diving into writing poetry again has been learning to embrace the crap. I wrote pages and pages of utter dreck this week and had to remind myself that the dreck is essential. It’s the fertilizer from which the good stuff grows. And who do I think I am anyway, that every word flowing from my pen shall be transcendent perfection? Anyway, I hope you enjoy this imperfect little ditty about the illustrious mango:

Meditation on My First Time Slicing a Mango

 

This flushed oval jewel, dense and dumb

Demands devotion to its common mystery.

Board and blade sing a reverent hum

to the cherished mango's sacred history.

I bury the blade in its flecked moon cheek

And yield a cradle of amber meat

I dice the pulp, sinewy-sleek

And sample its harvest, tang and sweet.

I rue the decades of my life deprived

of this incandescent, lavish glory.

My love of the luscious is thus revived

and the illustrious mango shall be my quarry!

 

 

--Kristen McHenry