Primigravida Musings....

My FB friend Vanita Kumta participates and manages a group called Health and Fitness on FB. She recently posted about Cashews . Both the Nut and the Fruit.

And what we see here, is actually  a bunch of "pregnant" cashew fruits , ripe with health, with a  cashew nut,  encased in a green-grey leathery pouch growing outside  their bodies.  Sometimes there is a planned harvest, sometimes "acts of nature" where wild animals and others break and separate the fruit and the nut(seed). At all times, nature provides an amazing protection for the nut encased in a leathery pouch containing the vilest of fluids that can burn your skin.

"Post term" , the fruit is processed  as a vegetable, and sometimes made into the popular Goan drink, Feni.  The nuts go through fire and brimstone, to emerge as the cashews we so casually enjoy.

Just some thoughts on births in our part of the world ....

Bursting with good health
these two
gonadal ovarian types,
in advanced stages of pregnancy,
bodies
redolent with nutrients,
hang out together
in the tree,
wondering about
varieties of
conception and birth
in the world.

Child bearing
outside themselves,
in a mean looking
grey acidy sac;
sometimes
a separation
from the child at birth,
and they go on
to a Feni celebration,
leaving the child to rough it out
through a
fire and roasting
it never forgets
and  then learns
to go out into the world,
girls and boys alike.

Yet those,
who grow,
sometimes unwanted,
hidden well inside
a mother's sac
way inside her body,
designed for a safe and wonderful birth,
sometimes get separated
just like the cashew.
soon after birth.

The Cashew doesn't understand
what it is to be a girl,
and why
in a world of sensible,
so called cultured,
cerebral cortex-enabled types,
such girls
are destroyed.

And so the two
yellow garbed primigravidas,
troubled,
move a bit closer together
in the breeze ,
and thank God,
that they are Cashews....