This project of mine, writing poems as a response to food-themed art, has the added benefit of making me more mindful of small things. Like cherries. They have associations beyond, well, cherries.
I remembered Marcel Proust and his madeleines. They were Monsieur Proust’s way of explaining involuntary memory – how an object, or a smell, or a taste, can trigger memories of the past.
I also remembered Sylvia Plath’s Mushrooms, a stunning metaphor about women’s empowerment. The more I thought about the cherries in this painting, the more I wondered where their metaphor lay for me.
Cherries
No party was complete
without our dangling
multiplicity, spilling from
baskets like a Roman painting.
Our seeds spat happily
into the quarter-acre yard.
Dreams of growing orchards,
even as our juice
purpled your gladiatorial chin.
Back in golden days
of cut grass, bicycle street roaming,
frozen ices, days that lingered
after twilight, we hung from
your ears and pretended
to be Egyptian,
sweetened your breath
and glazed your lips
with ancient-tomb colour.
Our blacknesss was
the colour of Christmas,
of promise, of another
summer spent languid
in front of televised cricket,
lazily eating bread and
honey, and dripping fruit
from on high
like some reclining Venus.
Come back to us!
We’ve been calling you.
Come back to us.
Dream again.
©elsp 2025
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