Eating a Bruised Bosc Pear on Armistice Day

by Christopher T. George
FreeWrights Peer Review
Second Place, December 2012
Judged by Polina Barskova


My short, serrated wood-handled knife slices
into pear-flesh soft as Camembert: the skin

of the fruit scarred like a map of the Somme
— shell craters, churned, disinterred No Man’s Land;

peeling away puttees, sodden khaki trousers,
a surgeon’s knife dissects a private’s leg.

To ghost machine gun fire, I savor sweet
overripe fruit: care-package from home.


This poem is exciting due it's being so specific, so precise, so dry-- one really can see, sense that moment of pleasure, moment of the Earth's kindness --Polina Barskova