how deep a plum was then!

My thanks to Claudia at dVerse Poetics Pub - Translucent Poetics : Writing the spoken word, for this prompt.

It was my tree.
Here, in my mind it was my tree,
for planted on the day that I was born.
I first and best remember it
when it and I were five.
My first excursion into it
(with someone holding me),
the earliest of sensual memories: 
allowed to pick the plums,
those velvet bombs of taste,
incendiaries of colour,
soft waxy reds and yellows,
purples, blues and indigoes.
Those plums, those sweet Victorias!

I found that you could spit
and rub them with your thumb,
make lines and other subtle colours rear
their lovely heads. You made a sort of map.
Inside, you'd find the prize: a golden flesh,
juice-filled, that squirted when you bit.

Later on, and maybe six, the hands
still round my waist, my head now full
of stories from the war, Atlantic
convoys and the like, I found
that if you bit the seam from end to end,
the squirting juice could easily
become a depth charge in your mouth.
Then if you gently squeezed the base,
the sharp stone surfaced like a crippled submarine.

---

This is a rewrite of part of a poem - rather too long and too opaque. One of the first I posted.