Nashery: Seeds

A Nashery is a poem consisting of mostly but not always rimed couplets in irregular metre, the form most often used by Ogden Nash. Not all of Nash's Nasheries were as preposterously irregular as his best known ones were, so cheap modern imitations like this one count as Nasheries. This form is especially well suited to Bad Poetry. It would be very hard to write a Nashery that seemed to take itself too seriously. Thanks to https://dsnake1.blogspot.com/2020/02/eating-orange.html for the idea...

Not all the fruits we eat 

are sweet.

To be counted as a fruit, it needs

to be an edible coating for seeds.

Tomatoes are fruit.

Zucchini are fruit.

Strawberries are fruit

because those cute

yellow dapples in their dimples are seeds.

So what do you do with the seeds?

If the seeds are soft and small

we may not notice them at all,

as in strawberries and bananas,

or eat them first, as in pomegranates.

If the seeds are big and hard

they might go in the compost in the yard

where most of them will never sprout

because fertility's bred out 

of many of the fruits we buy,

because our weather is too dry

or damp or cool or hot,

because animals eat them, or because they do not,

because the soil or the light

is not quite right,

because of an early dry spell or late frost.

In nature most seeds are always lost.

(Plant one for the jay, and one for the crow,

and one for the worms, and one just might grow.)

During the record drought and heat 

in nineteen-ninety-nine

a man sat out on his back steps to eat

a watermelon cool and fine

and although he lived in Maryland

a watermelon seed sprouted, all unplanned,

and it grew until it bore

one perfect miniature

watermelon, as sweet and pure

as the real thing from Arkansas.

An old hill farmer planted a peach

tree for his sons and daughters each.

They lived too far north

for the peach trees to bring forth

enough fruit to preserve, much less to sell,

except in nineteen-eighty-one when every crop did well.

The peach trees split when a heavy snow fell

and nobody pushed them back together

and they didn't survive much more cold weather.

But here and there a peach pit sprouted

in his yard, and the year he died

one sprout grew high enough they mowed round about it,

his children's joy and pride,

a Fabulous Feral Elberta Peach

tree that always bowed down under its fruit, each

year when other peach trees were bare,

and the borers just left it there,

and the sapsuckers dug elsewhere,

and the tree was green as Pomona's gown

and snapped right back up after bowing down,

and the peaches were small, but sweet

as any you ever would eat.

 

Though it's hard to raise seeds into apple trees

there was once an old preacher who had the gift.

He wandered the foothills and the prairies

saying apple trees gave the heart a lift

that he thought all people need.

He was called Johnny Appleseed.

The trees he planted along his way

bore fruit for a hundred years, they say.

So some of those trees (people said) were alive

in the year nineteen-forty-five

when our late,

great,

Grandma Bonnie Peters was a child at school.

Hearing this story, she made it a rule

to plant trees wherever she used to roam.

Wild persimmons, she planted around her home.

She said not a persimmon she ever found,

but when she grew old and moved into town

the trees bore persimmons, mellow and sweet,

for all of her friends and relations to eat.

Who knows whether, as we move on,

we leave some shred of our spirit behind

to stay near our friends when we are gone,

and always of us remind?

If fondly remembered you want to be,

think it all over, and plant a fruit tree.