Glenn Hubbard has lived in Madrid for 30 years and has been writing poems since 2012. Though fluent in Spanish, he is poetic only in English and has had poems published in a number of magazines. Nature and landscapes are often an inspiration for his writing. Spain has a lot of both.
Fruit in the 60s
The grapes languished in a bowl in my nan’s living room,
losing their lustre as they dulled under dust.
They might have been ornamental, the stuff of still life.
Eating them felt like an afterthought.
Dinner was there to fill you up and puddings were entertainment.
But fresh fruit lacked all purpose except, it seemed, to keep teeth clean.
Hence that chimp on the TV screen, brandishing a toothsome
apple as the plummy voice-over lauded its evident dental hygiene.
Fruit could come out of a tin, of course, a totally different matter
as we gathered round the table to look on with drooling anticipation
as the sweet syrup supplied the required lubricity and
our afters slithered slurpingly into the waiting bowl.
There they lay, expectant, those halved pears
made in a place called Bartlett. Ice cream from
Naples slipped in beside them in a scandalously
calorific act of consummation. It was only natural!
Glenn Hubbard