Forming the Pomegranate :: Fruits Foods Papers

Forming the Pomegranate pomegranate Punica granatum Punicaceae Derived from Old French pome grenate pome for apple and grenate, having umpteen 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 incompatible 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 kind found upon a childs skull--the demeanor the cranial bones 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 dark, damp seeds inside wither. I place it in the fall of the sun, beneath my window. The pomegranate fits my hand, my handle that agrees to the rises and slopes of the fruit. My fingers curl ing 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 swear out with whom they fall in love) and from his chariot he clasp the girl, descending into his dark land. He would have said I loved her because she was so light. Upon the earth the pot 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 fling and all creatures a languid shade of hoar, 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 essential 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. Later certain travelers carried its seeds on their journeys across the Mediterranean. It now claims many lands India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, tropical Africa.