Product Review in Bad Poetry: Clover Valley Fruit Cocktail

This one was written in the summer of 2020. The fruit had been sprayed, and who knows what else was wrong with it, and it had a memorable effect on me. I found my brain gushing verse couplets throughout the five minutes the pears stayed down...

In really cheap fruit mixes, there’s

Nothing inside but only pears.

Here’s what this tragic lack of peaches,

Upon consideration, teaches:

Only when taken unawares

Would anybody pay for pears.

For pineapples some gladly pay;

For cherries, in the month of May;

But folk with bills to pay, and cares,

Would never pay a cent for pears.

Fruit mixes could do without apple,

As could Rush Limbaugh without Snapple.

Fruit mixes might not miss the mango;

Puritans never missed the tango.

Fruit mixes lacking tangerines

Will do, like chili lacking beans.

But best without some one fruit? There’s

No question: that fruit would be pears.

As all good orchard keepers know,

“Plant one pear tree for blooms like snow;

Then, while you sell dear friends strawberries

And business connections cherries,

June apples to your distant cousins

And children Rambos by the dozens,

To those whose company rather wears

You send what fruit the pear tree bears;

It bears no fruit at all, most years,

And for that people shed no tears.”

An ornamental pear’s no crime;

The fruit will do for snacks, in prime;

Mixed fruit’s still good to eat when shares

Of up to ten percent are pears…

The French may seem to think a lot

Of pears with vin and chocolat,

But what they eat’s not fit for bears.

The French may have my share of pears.

  

Then I spent some time appreciating the cleanness of the bathroom floor, and the thought of what a sorry thing it was to be so sick, after eating pears, as vividly impressed upon my mind. 

Some time between the writing of these lines and the decision to post them I had a lifetime first experience: an acquaintance did express positive enjoyment of pears. But they were "heirloom" pears, of a long-gone breed, from a long-gone tree. The person's own pear trees are the Bradford variety, known for producing especially thick coats of blossoms, in spring, and almost never a fruit.