Strawberries taste like summer, with a sweetness that gives me visions of green strawberry fields
With bright red gems glittering with the morning’s slowly dissipating fog
And fragile white, round-winged butterflies fluttering through the miles and miles of sweet strawberries.
Tasting a strawberry in the midst of a winter, I wonder how far we roam to find strawberries in a place so cold
Across the country, through the snow, to the other side of the world where it isn’t below zero
Or maybe just a little down south, where the porch is warm enough to languidly rock and watch the trucks drive by
Through day and night, to bring these strawberries out of the light and hope they survive.
A journey up the coast, to where the sun doesn’t shine and the earth is too cold for strawberries to grow
They taste like another place, or another time, as I’ve witnessed summer before with my own eyes:
It smells like the green leaves of the strawberry, tastes just as sweet and sounds like cicadas
Feels like sweat on my forehead, my bare feet on sand and a cool salty wind with an ocean wave cadence.
I wonder if strawberries in the winter taste just as nostalgic as pomegranates in the summer
To fully validate the irony in that I only miss one when I’m with the other.
