My word is inspired by the fact that the grocery store had blood oranges in the produce section on Sunday, and the blood orange is one kind of hesperidium.
Hesperidium is a noun denoting a berry with a leathery rind and its fruit in sections. Though we don't commonly think of lemons and oranges as "berries" exactly, they are, and citrus of all kinds are forms of hesperidia.
The name comes from Greek mythology and the Garden of the Hesperides where golden apples were said to grow.
The stem of the Greek word Hesperides is hesper-, and it means "evening" or "west" (since the sun sets in the west in the evening). Greek hesper- is traced back to the I-E root wespero-, meaning "evening" or "night," and the same I-E root working through different languages gives us west and vespers.
source: AHD
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Blood Orange
ReplyDeleteBy Charles Simic
It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.
I believe it's going to rain.
The birds in the park are silent.
Nothing is what it seems to be,
Nor are we.
There's a tree on our street so big
We can all hide in its leaves.
We won't need any clothes either.
I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.
In my head, I'm a passenger on a ghost ship.
Not even a sigh outdoors now,
If a child was left on our doorstep,
It must be asleep.
Everything is teetering on the edge of everything
With a polite smile.
It's because there are things in this world
That just can't be helped, you said.
Right then, I heard the blood orange
Roll off the table and with a thud
Lie cracked open on the floor.