Grapefruit

He has two wishes for his sixth
birthday: a pocket of ruby grapefruit
and a citrus knife
with a bend in it.

It is the Fast of Ramadhan — the twenty-eighth day
in — and the weather shows no consideration.
Flies and an irreverent heat
nudge Mr Sahlie the fruit seller
and his cart horse up the street.

The children are waiting. They know
he will come. He’ll spoil them
with a fistful of pomegranate, a slice of ice
green melon. Upside down they wait
dangling limbs and rinds of chatter
from the purple crown of a jacaranda
tree. They swing from a sandpit sky
scuffed toes bare, swishing through a thick mirage
of air. Up at the gate, in the post-box shade
beach buckets brim with the horse’s drink.

Ramadhan. And today is the boy’s
sixth birthday. He drops to the ground
with a ripe fruit sound, runs
pelter, pelter down the street.
There’s a horse, a cart and an old man
to meet.

And of course he’s remembered. He whistles
and grins, heaves the grapefruit down.
Next week, they agree, when the Fast
is complete, they’ll sit on the pavement
enjoy a pink feast.

“Why, Mr Sahlie?” I hear my boy speak.
“Why do they smell so wet
and deep?”

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poetry & Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website

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