MEDLARS - SHE'S APPLES!

            In the rustic green garden of Catherine of Yarragon

            Bobbled hundreds of frightful skulls of medlars woe-begone

            Apples blackened with ague or rotting with plague on

            To the wincing jaundiced quince, mug-ugly first cousin

Yea, hundreds of death-masks dropping with aplomb

            Like conkers, round brown faces, some bruised mauve to plum

            Hollowed–out black eyes squinched neath nasal bar’s helm

            Curving sepals summon knights from a distant Norman realm

Mid a circuit of arthritic sticks, twiglets, thin limbs twisting round

Blue wrens bopping along budded forks, titbits to bring down

Branches over the fence tugged at by mares in foal to crunch on

            Elizabethan courtiers were partial to sweet medlars for luncheon

           

Yet eyes a-twinkle, Chaucer peddled medlars as ‘open-arse fruit’    

            And brazenly Shakespeare hath a way of following suit.

Though Will must’ve admired the delicious irony of ‘bletten’,

For the squishy mushed medlar is ripe only when rotten

But thin-skinned goes slithery and sticky underfoot

Trust fervid D. H. Lawrence to put his foot in it,

Writing off this humble bauble as ‘Autumnal Excrement’!

            A tasty medley of apple and pear, declared those more clement

                                                                                               

Michael Small

                                                            June, 2020