Manna

The loquat bends with clustered orbs of yellow
fruit, velvet at the edges. We steal its light

at every opportunity, passing on the other 
side of where it's been fenced in. We are mostly

inconsequential to the ones who mark this wealth 
so studiously: each tree numbered, even as the fruit 

wastes to a dark syrup the gravel path. If heaven 
drops a date or any other kind of fruit, the proverb 

goes, you open your palm. Or is it your mouth? 
If the distance from hand to mouth is the measure 

of how near you are to a pot of rice boiling 
on the stove, how many scoops will put your hunger 

to bed? The women chew betel leaf and areca nut because
they know how the mouth must be slaked then numbed 

from time to time; how the red they pulp with their teeth 
is small intermission before the  curtains pull open again.