Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle

     This is an amazing poem. Written(I think) by a man named John Tobias, it bears the extremely long title "Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend called Felicity." Read through it yesterday in lit, which is where I came across it. Sort of a poetic equivalent to Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Golden Road, and the spirit of other books like it.

"During that summer
When unicorns were still possible,
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned,
When shiny horse chestnuts
(Hollowed out
Fitted with straws
Crammed with tobacco
Stolen from butts
In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
Of civilization;

"During that summer -
Which may have never been at all,
But which has become more real
Than the one that was -
Watermelons ruled.

"Thick imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chins,
Leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
At the walls
At the wind
At each other;

"And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite:
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.

"The bites are fewer now
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

"But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer that maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue
Unicorns become possible again."