Eat Your Oranges
You cannot know
the taste, the texture, the scent,
the pithy curvature of orange
if you have never eaten
an orange.
No soothsayer
can call it up for you.
No agent
can do it for you.
Is eating an orange
so scary?
Or is it unworthy
of your time?
But do you really want
to leave this flesh
with this flesh
never having eaten
an orange?
Or do you hope
delaying the eating
will delay the time?
Maybe – who knows?
Maybe in the kitchens sifted
from piles of earth and ash
a thousand years from now
these oranges,
shrunken, ossified,
resting in this your own
hand thrown clay bowl
will be gently dusted,
displayed in a glass cube, be
the fascination
of thousands who - who knows? -
maybe no longer even eat,
who file by.
You may be among them.
M.S. Rooney lives in Sonoma, California with her husband, poet Dan Noreen. Her work appears in journals, including Bluestem, The Cortland Review, Earth's Daughters, Main Street Rag, Theodate, and 3:AM Magazine, and anthologies, including American Society: What Poets See, edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King (FutureCycle Press), and Journey to Crone, edited by S. Philipp (Chuffed Buff Books).