Small Tomato Sprawl Scrawl

SMALL TOMATO SPRAWL SCRAWL
Kindly refer to notes

We’re tomatoes [b]red together,
dependant on capricious weather
happy-go-lucky hell-for-leather
advancing, never asking whether
we’ll end in bird crop, rot, - whatever
providing seeds sprout on forever.

* * * * *

Read of the facts that history
recounts for all posterity.
Around five hundred years ago,
learn, inwardly digest, and know
cerasiforme – like a cherry –
appearance then, as tiny tree.

Columbus brought us ‘cross the sea
in fourteen hundred ninety three,
Mattioli's Herbal mentionned though
he thought us poison pomi d’oro –
gold apple – red then none could see.
We came through Spain to Italy.

Across Atlantic bravely we
sailed in the fifteenth century,
though there’s some evidence to show
that ‘stout Cortez’ from Mexico
imported us as seeds or tree
the Aztecs called xitomatli.

The Aztecs added salt, chili,
to make their salsa formerly,
as sprawling vine the tomato
advances and is wont to grow
up reaching sometimes metres three –
as many yards for backyards’ glee.

Before first cookbook recipe
Time flew with true celerity –
Two hundred years - and why so slow?
Confused with Deadly Nightshade’s glow
or Belladonna’s poison pea -
witch wolf-peach named in Germany

Book edited in Napoli
began tamed famed name followed free
after some fifty years or so
by other authors in the know,
by Glass’s ‘Art of Cookery’
to flavour soup, ingredient key.

In Peru six variety
still grow as they were meant to be;
unlike the lowly potato
no vegetable, fruit yellow
to bunch for brunch or sandwich, tea:
sprawl scrawl hastes good taste poetry.

18 August 2009
robi03_1895_robi03_0000 WXX_MNX

Author notes
Words in brakets convey two or more meanings
[b]red = red bed bred

Tomatoes belong to the genus Lycopersicon, Solanaceae family. Evidence supports the theory the first domesticated tomato was a little yellow fruit, ancestor of L. cerasiforme, growing around and possibly eaten by the Aztecs

First mentioned in European literature in 1544, herbal by Italian physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, who named it pomi d’oro, golden apple.

Related to deadly nightshade (Atropus belladonna) which gave a false impression of being poisonous

The first cookbook to mention tomatoes was published in Naples Italy in 1692. By 1752 English cooks used tomatoes in the flavoring of soups, and in 1758 a tomato recipe appeared in The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glass.

‘stout Cortez’ - John Keats - On First Looking in Chapman's Homer

poem by Jonathan Robin
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!