Eating Strawberries Poem by Sveta Guralnik

I was eating strawberries
With sugar and cream
And reading from a book
About a Chinese girl
Dying
On a hot summer day,
Stung by a bee.
The girl's name
Was Beautiful Moon.
I couldn't stop reading,
And I couldn't stop eating
Strawberries
With sugar and cream.

It was a long South-Indian afternoon,
February,
Already hot.
Already summer.
Dusty evergreen trees
Besieged the house.
All the sounds of the world
Turned off.
Time stood still.

The strawberries
Were like real.
Like real strawberries
That I used to eat
In a small Ukrainian town
In my grandparents' kitchen
On summer vacations
When I was still wearing
A cotton frock, pink.
When I once stepped,
Barefoot,
On a dying bee
In the bedroom.
The bee
Stung me.
It was a little painful,
And it felt unfair,
That's all.

Here, a friend told me,
They grow strawberries
Near Mumbai.
There are endless fields
Of strawberries, she said,
The fields look like real.

It takes 24 hours by train,
From Mumbai
To where we now live.