• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Reading
    • Blog
    • On Writing
    • Interviews
    • Famous Authors
    • Stories
    • Poetry
  • Writing
    • Writing Tips
    • Writing Inspiration
    • Playground
    • Writing Prompts
  • Publishing
    • Publishing Tips
    • Literary Magazines
    • Book Publishers
  • Promotions
    • Book Promotions
    • Promoting Tips
    • Classifieds
    • Newsletter
  • Submit

Every Day Poems

A Poem A Day

  • Poetry of the 1500s
  • Poetry of the1600s
  • Poetry of the 1700s
  • Poems for Kids
  • War Poems
  • Every Poem

The Grapefruit by Lauren Hunt

July 9, 2012 by Every Writer

The Grapefruit

by Lauren Hunt

My fingers barely close around the grapefruit.
I feel the weight and size of it, how the rind gives
And stretches and rolls in the palm of my hand,
The missing half of a long forgotten morning prayer.

This grapefruit is a memory, aged but precious.
I am a child again, sitting across from my grandfather,
Eating our breakfasts together. My grandmother
Always told me I could eat as I pleased for breakfast,

But grapefruit for him meant grapefruit for me, too.
By way of blessing, he nods firmly at me and we rip
Our sugar packets open, together, scattering the strips
Of pink wrinkled paper across the table.

In the grapefruit memory, he’s no longer as round
And laughing as before the first heart attack, but not yet
As sick and frail as after his fourth. He reads the Jonesboro
Sun from cover to cover, even the political pieces, which

Elicit mostly tsking. He says he can’t believe how red
The state of Bill Clinton and small farmers has gone.
Across the worn, handmade table, I sit quietly,
Chewing on the sweet and sour of the grapefruit,

And studying the lines of his cheeks and the sunspots
On his forehead, the anointing balm of a cotton grower.

###
Lauren Hunt is currently a law student at the University of Alabama. She graduated with a minor in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University in 2012. She was active as a writer and staff member of Expressionists literary magazine and hopes to continue writing and publishing in the years to come. She can be contacted at lshunt@crimson.ua.edu.

Filed Under: Love Poems

Primary Sidebar

AD




Search

Latest

Because We Steer by Dead Stars by Claire Scott

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others.

I’ve Set Out All of the Traps for Us by Kiara Nicole Letcher

I start to miss you right after you leave
and then at night I feel a deep ache
in that need spot.

The Shaman by Larry D. Thomas

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published several award-winning and critically acclaimed collections of poetry

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in