I was a farmer once,
not tilling the back forty
but I nursed a grapefruit pit
I had planted in a pot on the window sill.
After a season of not over-watering
I had a bumper crop of green leaves.
At least that’s how I want to remember it.
I gave up agricultural husbandry
around age eleven never quite knowing
a seed from a pit until now.
Pits are in watermelon, right? Wrong.
Those are just big seeds pregnant
with embryos like poets on the verge.
Pits are the stones in peaches or plums
protecting the genius of the burst.
As for that grapefruit on the sill
it has taken me eighty years
to get my head out of the rind
from the pits to the seed.
And when the cymbals clang
or the phrase wings in
through the wall, through the noise,
it is a seed as in the citrus,
music dripping with juice.
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