'Scenes From a Greengrocery Store' Poem

I share the food shopping rituals with my wife. I take the opportunity to gather and hunt for our needs and because I enjoy cooking. I get the opportuntiy to purchase fresh produce from markets, supermarkets and greengrocers. Greengrocers are a diminishing commodity these days given the stranglehold of the giant supermarket corporations. I support them when I can. Every Wednesday, there is a produce market in the main street of my town. It attracts huge crowds, so the desire for fresh fruit and vegetables has not waned.

I consciously avoid processed food items and their questionable additives. The opportunity to create a meal with fresh ingredients is a strong motivating factor. It emanates from my father's passion for maintaining an extensive fruit and vegetable garden when I was growing up. Money was scarce, but we always ate healthy meals. I adopted the mantra is 'Don't buy something your grandmother wouldn't recognize.'

This poem jumped into my trolley as I wandered through a local greengrocer's store. It further proves that we must be ready when the spark of inspiration presents its light. Verse from vegies and flavoursome fruit...

Scenes From a Greengrocery Store

Stacks of fruit and vegetables

Fresh produce, harvested and neatly presented

with precise packing

-Quite fetching to the buyer’s eye.

Oranges,

the colour of summer sunsets

Rise in glowing pyramids

Tomatoes stacked to beckon buyers

With their shiny, blemish free skin

And juicy promises held within, blush.

The lettuce sit tight

With their layers of folded secrets securely held from view.

Cauliflowers turn up with flowers tucked under their wings

While trim spring onions sit beside the leeks trying not to convey an air of inferiority.

String bean round and just a little bloated, cluster randomly

As the potatoes inform the world they like playing in the dirt.

Onions with their flaky skins await the opportunity to make some unsuspecting shopper cry

when cut and sliced in some future kitchen ritual.

Blueberries are cheap today

Cheaper then yesterday

And all the bananas are bent.

Alan j Wright

It is Poetry Friday and our host this time is Carol Labuzzetta. Check out Carol's post at The Apples In My Orchard.

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