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Tony Gentry

Your Peach and Mine – a poem

Updated: May 17, 2024

Breakfast on the porch, a Saunders Bros. peach in my cereal, thought to share a poem derived from a long defunct peach orchard in Arvonia, VA. Grab yourself a summer peach and read on!


Maybe you rose from scented sheets fingered by louvered shades to a saucer with mint sprigs and the turgid flesh neatly sliced of a single perfect peach each day of an air-conditioned summer.  Was that our purpose?


Boots laced against the snakes shirts cinched to the collar against the itch in old lady hats that haloed our necks in shade we reached with netted poles teetered on leaning ladders and tugged against the surly spring of a motherly branch, cupping them in our palms tenderly releasing them to baskets as if they were eggs.  Until the sun turned peach in setting.


You could say that.  But my guess is that you have forgotten those tedious mornings, having to swim or call a friend to make a day.  While we meet in the shade of a long-shuttered shed unfold our pocket knives and as the juice streams down our wrists laugh at how sick we’d get by end of day having fed and watered ourselves on the wind-fallen, bee-sucked weed-nested bruised too ripe to share with you. 


If we are what we do:  If our days add up to anything, then you can have the wisp a chlorined pool recalls.  Give me that buzzing morning, a thousand times repeated that feeds a reeling harvest each time I sniff a peach.


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