How to Fuck Up a Peach

Why did you pull it from the branch green?
Why did you snatch it, hard and mean,
from the steady, sure fingers of the sun,
sun rubbing its honey under the skin, coaxing
the moist plumpness, the swelling, and then
the unstoppable pitch and crest into ripeness.
How could you interrupt this love act
between heaven and earth, shoving it
into the dark winter of a 40-degree vault
locked up for market, rushed for cold cash.

We may as well be eating a green dollar bill.
We are being robbed this moment of summer’s
sugar and light. This peach-flesh is downright rubbery,
ruined to the very core, refusing to the pit
to give any pleasure whatsoever
to a tongue starved for peach-sweetness.
Who committed this unnatural act,
who picked this, this
shrunken green tennis-ball of a peach?
We tell you for sure:  it wasn’t Eve.

And don’t think we mean the poor strong cut
fingers when we ask who pulled and twisted—
we mean your clean fingers ready to smudge
and snuff the last landscapes, signing the papers,
commanding the economics of shipping
and ripping away the fruit of the earth God
gave us then selling it back dead on the shelf.
Command all you want:  you can’t
command ripeness. Mr. Del Monte, Mr. Dole
and the whole troop born of United Fruit:
Neruda had his word with you and now we have ours.

You may say a corporation is faceless, blameless
but not when it comes to crossing summer,
not when it comes to snatching her honey,
not when it comes to royally fucking up 
the plush, sweet lusciousness of just-ripe peach.