Forming the Pomegranate :: Fruits Foods Papers

Forming the Pomegranate false fruitgranate Punica granatum Punicaceae Derived from Old French pome grenate pome for apple and grenate, having many seeds. And there is also Latin grantus, granum, grain, seed. This skin of a pomegranate is like tissue, the inside of the body, like blood clotting. Soft tissue. At least twenty-seven different hues of red. Or any other number, perhaps it is more. Pomegranate red when a lip is bitten, the inside of the mouth--soft tissues of the mouth. The fruits body is deformed, rough, parched. Gentle dents, the shape found upon a nestlings skull--the way the cranial b hotshots fuse together. Parched, callused I think of browning manuscripts in libraries I think of hands.I have one here I am trying to dry, letting it shrivel, concave upon itself. I am letting the repulsiveness, damp seeds inside wither. I place it in the subside of the sun, beneath my window. The pomegranate fits my hand, my palm that agrees to the rises and slopes of the fruit. My fingers curling across the indentations, uneven red ground. When Demeter, the goddess of the earth, lost her daughter Persephone, she made winter. The god of the underworld, pale Hades, saw the beautiful child (one can never help with whom they fall in love) and from his chariot he clasp the girl, descending into his dark land. He would have said I love her because she was so light. Upon the earth the people were confused by the new cold and still Demeter refused spring until her daughter was returned. The other gods demanded of Hades the release of Persephone.In that dark land, soil as sky and all creatures a languid shade of gray, Persephone ate of a pomegranate. She ate six seeds and those small seeds, Hades artifice, bound her to him for six months of the year, always. And so she rose to Demeter and still must return again to her melancholy groom, every year the same footsteps, the same chariot of black horses.Pomegranate beneath the soil, a muted shade of gray and seeds als o a color she did not recognize. Pomegranate, which is regarded as food for the dead. I learned this fruits story pomegranates origins in Iran, in the Himalayas. ulterior certain travelers carried its seeds on their journeys across the Mediterranean. It now claims many lands India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, tropical Africa.