Desert's Watermelon

Wild in the deserts

Of Egypt and Sudan,

Grows hard and bitter fruit

Called gurma in the land.

Harvested and hoarded

Somewhere in the shade,

It holds a fount of water

In green flesh that it made.

Water for dry seasons,

Water kept in storage,

Water for a Pharaoh's Ba

On his celestial voyage.

The fibrous fruit was pounded,

So water bound would flow.

A gift to desert dwellers

Five millennia ago.

From one gene only dominant

That bitter taste was made,

So if recessive flowers met

The bitterness would fade.

Melons bearing yellow flesh,

By the Common Era's time,

Rabbis classed with grapes and figs

As sweet within the rind.

The gene for sugar links with red,

Though DNA was not yet spelled,

Medieval farmers bred

A fruit fit for angels.

Ruby slabs of watermelon

Decorate my table,

While in the wild deserts

Its ancestral stock is stable.

Civilization could collapse,

There could be Armageddon.

But in five thousand years,

Survivors could

-Again -

Have watermelon.

I've taken up a challenge from Richard Feyman, the famous 20th century physicist: Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars... but far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? Who are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? Join me with short rhyming poems inspired by science.