Martha Deed

RESEARCH AND DIRE PREDICTIONS

             With gratitude to the BBC World Service reporter
             who brought this to our attention, January 16, 2003.
 
The modern banana faces certain extinction in the next ten years
the modern version
the one with decent taste
which unlike the traditional old-fashioned bad-tasting banana with seeds
can neither reproduce itself
nor ward off genetic invasion
plastic banana
useless banana
devoid of adequate defense
it looks good
tastes good
but its extermination
by third-world fungi
is almost certain and its demise
could launch a famine
and economic ruin the likes of which
the world has not seen
since the Irish Potato Famine
the banana's sole chance for survival
in this banana-dependent economy is to blend it with
its tasteless seedy ancestors
thus preserving the look of a banana
but infusing it with the taste of apples raising the question
is a banana worth saving
if survival means sacrificing its most banana-like
characteristics?  and if salvation requires
return to the basic unimproved dull and less beautiful fruit
one capable of independent life
is salvation found then in the throwing off of artifice however enticing
in favor of the real, the ugly and the fertile?

Location:	North Tonawanda, New York
Email:	mldeed1@juno.com
Publications:	The Awakenings Review, Shampoo, Miller's Pond Online, Artvoice, Buffalo News, Niagara Gazette, www.erasures.net, Beehive, www.landofbrokenpromises.co.uk, Magazen Sudden

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