Going Bananas

Poem by Melissa Balmain

Stores nationwide have been besieged with shoppers panic-buying everything from toilet paper to, strangely, bananas. — News item.

Although I'm just as big a fan as
anybody of bananas,
I've seldom come across a plan as
dumb as piling up bananas.
They don't last long (hence your Great-Granna's
jokes re buying green bananas):
unless all meals, from Texarkana's
to Tarrytown's, involve bananas,
and zoos—Seattle's to Savannah's—
get vast donations of bananas,
we'll soon have mountains like Montana's
of stinky, slimy, black bananas
and no one—even Pollyannas—
will ever buy more damn bananas. ◊

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Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of light verse. Here’s the “green bananas” joke, as told by Florida Congressman Claude Pepper in 1984: “A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas.”