Hullo there,
Here’s one last treat — a little banana to see you through the holidays, now issue 8 is all wrapped up.
This is from Helena Nelson’s excellent first collection Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003) and it is silly and charming. Its rhymes change completely depending on what accent you read the poem in which, to me, makes the reading of it all the more delightful. Enjoy.
See you next year.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS you might want to read it sideways on a phone, or on a bigger-than-phone-sized screen, or projected onto a banana farm for safety.
Mens sana in corpore banano
My mother read bananas make you calmer.
I was impressed. I flew out to Havana
and purchased fifty sacks of best banana
from Mario Pax, a small banana farmer.
I hurried home, convinced the gift would calm her
but mother simply snarled. I got my armour
and put on metal gloves – oh not to harm her –
but just to help me force the first banana
between her fangs. It did, I think, disarm her.
She ate ten more. And then some ham from Parma
looking quite pleased. Desperate to charm her
I offered her another ten bananas.
At last it seemed no gesture could alarm her –
she scoffed the lot, as reverent as a palmer
or teenager spaced out on marihuana,
then wolfed tabasco sauce and pickled llama
with marmalade and lashings of piranha.
At last she smiled and with one cry – Nirvana! –
she dropped down dead. O mater, mater alma!
Your visage grim has never been much calmer
and never will again. The nice embalmer
(his name’s Barack, like President Obama)
observed that he was partial to banana.
He looked on sudden death as simply Karma,
a fitting end to every mellow drama.
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