The Taste of Scarlet Light

A poem about a magical fruit.

Photo by Mary Borysova on Unsplash

It is magical. You can’t convince me otherwise. It was magical long before we started calling it a superfood.

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POMEGRANATE


To the child I was, it was a mystery
appearing once or maybe twice a year;
my mother would slice through its leathered
red-brown skin, break the fruit open, 
sit me down at the table with the smallest half -–
me with a paper napkin in my collar,
another at my fingertips, while for once
I interrogated a foodstuff slowly,
peeling back papery plant-plastic membranes
from each nested cache of seeds, awed by the way
they caught the light like rubies, by the way 
their nesting shaped each seed in facets 
like a jewel, the way each seed burst in my mouth
(the way no jewel would do) with agonizingly
intense sweet-tartness, and in the center
of each jewel the mote of grit,
the seed-at-heart.
                                  Swallowed one by one,
sowing a secret pomegranate forest 
deep in my belly, every unseen tree
laden with leathered bundles all compact
of treasure redder, brighter than my blood –-
and how these seed-jewels stained, like blood,
when knife or tongue or fingertip insulted them,
how, careful as I was, I ended always
with scarlet-fade-to-pink tingeing my skin;
a brand to wear in honor of the jewels
now hidden at the roots of secret trees,
in honor of the mystery that consigned
this hoard of treasure to my plate and belly,
that fed me with the taste of scarlet light.

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[You can listen to an audio recording of the poem using the little widget under the photograph.]

I had a fraught relationship with food when I was growing up (to say nothing of most of my years as an adult). Suspicion, anxiety, comfort, secrecy, shame, all got mixed up in it; even when I was eating from the short list of foods that I enjoyed, I was usually also feeling uneasy to some degree.

That’s part of what made the occasional pomegranate so magical. It was, in my life, such a completely out-of-context food; not something you ate because you were hungry or because you could get away with it or because someone said it was Good For You, but because it appeared like a gift from some otherworldly realm and demanded your full attention — and repaid that attention extravagantly.

Superfood? Pfui. Try eating a pomegranate as an enchantment … by which I mean, try sitting down with one as a seven-year-old might, uncovering its seeds and being astonished by their shape and color and flavor, letting its juices dye your mouth and fingertips. Discover the parts of you that were hungry for magic, as it feeds them.