Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2026
Twenty-first Century Branded Fruit Versus The Dreaming,
poem by John W Sexton.
Twenty-first Century Branded Fruit Versus The Dreaming
No one anymore wants to shop the true
but misshapen fruit of the myth-aisles,
to caress the velvet foreskin of the apricot,
the golden apple that a male god and his male devil
first used to implicate a pristine Eve.
There’s no knowledge in the fruit aisles now:
Granny Smith and Old Mother Williams
usurped by a young pink lady and her siblings,
hybridised with modified code;
the cloying, sickly pineapple, symbol of old money
and corporate wealth; and, of course, the F-worded
phallic banana waiting to be unsheathed.
But split the true pineapple from its crown to its base,
the pineapple of the first garden,
and here you see the two golden sisters, shoulder to shoulder,
their stiff upright hair of green, their owl’s eyes of bright gold:
Two Equals One. For in Nature
division does not mean fragmentation, but regeneration.
Halve the pomegranate from its vulva to its skull-button,
and you will see the many wombs
and their manifold gem-like foetuses:
the many children destined
all to become the one Mother again and again.
The Multiple, Manifold Goddess,
now swimming, now rising through the meniscus of sleep;
the Dark Goddess in her crab-claw necklace,
burrowing through the tidal muck, up to her imagination
in lugworms, razorfish, black winkles;
the Bright Goddess, her itchy-ball menses spreading forest upon forest;
the Goddess who offers her fruiting heads to the pecking crows;
whose eternal suffering is in turn repaid by the myriad birds of the air,
who fertilise her branches and roots with their lives, with their deaths,
so that they may be birthed in turn
as petal-winged sirens emerging from blossoms.
© John W Sexton
John W Sexton lives on Carn Mór, a mountain on the Kerry side of the Beara peninsula in the Republic of Ireland. He identifies with the Aisling poetic tradition and his work spans vision poetry, contemporary fabulism and tangential surrealism. His poetry is widely published and he has been a regular contributor to Live Encounters. He is the author of eight poetry collections, the most recent being Futures Pass (Salmon Poetry 2018), Visions at Templeglantine (Revival Press 2020) and The Nothingness Kit (Beir Bua 2022). In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.