The Last Fruit Gone - 4 Perished Poem by Unnikrishnan Sivasankara Menon

The Last Fruit Gone - 4

The young mango tree was
so proud in its glory borrowed
that it bore the growing burden
of the heavy pumpkin vine

'Why is this flower different? '
asked the mango tree one day.
'It's a female flower
that'll grow into a fruit.'

'A female flower? '
'Yes! The others are all male'
there, in a few more days,
were female flowers many.

Weeks passed, female flowers
grew into large pumpkins
each weighing many kilograms
branches bent under their weight.

The young mango tree
perished under the weight
shorn of branches and leaves
due to its own foolishness.

the pumpkin vine, however
survives, though it lost
a few shoots, flowers
and all the large heavy pumpkins.


Note:
(For those who have not seen a pumpkin vine)

Mango flowers come in a large attractive bunches(efflorescence) , which holds both male and female flowers. The individual mango flower, be it male or female, is very tiny and unattractive. This makes it hard to distinguish between male and female flowers in a mango efflorescence. So, it was not known to the mango tree itself that separate male and female flowers existed.

In the case pumpkin, the male and female flowers can be distinguished easily. On the first sight both may look the same due to the large bright orange petals. But, on a closer look, one can see that the male flower stands on a slender stalk, while the female one stands on a thicker stalk with swollen bulbous pistil (containing the ovaries) on which the petals are arranged. The female flowers are usually larger than the male ones.