January 2021
Bio Note: With stay at home orders and the holidays coinciding, our neighbors have been such
a source of support and exchange this year. It’s become a tradition for me to write a seasonal poem and
send it out in cards and emails at Christmastime although I don’t myself celebrate with a tree or many
gifts. There will be dried persimmons this year, however, as there were pomegranates and oranges the years before.
Corona Christmas
As we wait for rains, I dry fruit.
This year it’s the sunny persimmon
sliced and placed in our dehydrator
for transformation to longer-lived
wedges of coral candy. Long live the many
varietaled persimmon, some astringent, some eaten
like apples. Hangs as ornaments on leafless
branches. Korean legend considers this late
fall fruit brave foe to a tawny tiger scared
away from the town by one—
globe that fends off the fearsome.
We need these spheres of sweetness,
omens of bravery and goodness, restoration
and renewal. This year desiccates us with calamities—
how we long for it to end! Tonight Rita brings
forty hachiyas from Ann’s tree. Our neighborhood
fruit-chain-exchange. Our kitchen awash with poppy
colored rounds, stellar landscape like a sand dollar inside
its flesh. I cut them, golden shards, newborns
in gift baskets at the threshold of January’s front door.
Gathering
Our tree, fertile with them, red-fruited-multi-faceted ornaments of pride. Start as lipstick red flowers that drop into faded garlands wreathing like a collar fallen to the floor. Red bulbs appear, harbingers for the fruit. Hard shelled, pregnant, crimson- seeded miracles. How did they get so large? And why are the seeds so hard to extract? It’s been a dry summer, a dryer fall, and yet here they are, so many we have to look for places to donate them. A homesick man named Igor, from Armenia, once climbed the tree for some, afterwards left a thank you note. and packages of crackers and cookies from Trader Joe’s. A neighbor comes this year with two kids, fascinated while cutting them off the tree, eager to begin the harvest of scarlet cells called arils. Friends graciously receive too many, send to the east coast in a box. Make jam, bread. Put on salads. Bring to other neighbors. Everyone set to whacking at them. Our kitchen a crime scene, splayed with the stains of ruby-juice. Persephone visits our dreams. She who sacrificed to give us winter, shadow days, blizzards of rain. A cleansing. The ways we try for redemption. The tree, a skeleton now, still a few offerings left on otherwise vacant branches. So many years, such faithful service. During the dark times, beacon of magenta, of vermillion.
Originally published in The Full Moon Herald, Grayson Press, 2020
©2021 Phyllis Klein
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL