holmes_minor | Poem: Fruitful Verse: G

Title: Fruitful Verse
Rating: G
Length: 305
Poetic Form: etheree (octuple)
Author's Note: Greenaway's Language of Flowers gives the following meanings: cherry (good education); plum (fidelity); peach (your qualities like your charms are unequal); raspberry(remorse); and strawberry (love and esteem); the tart also contains blackberry and blueberry preserves.
Inky's Note: Mrs. Hudson was kind enough to lend me the use of her kitchen (and her opposable thumbs) to prepare a most auspicious dessert, the epiphany tart, for presentation with this verse on this felicitous occasion and so I humble submit:

To Mister Holmes, a bit of fruitful verse on this the anniversary of your birth.

Dark
crimson
drupe is the
education
of Sherlock Holmes. They
dangle in clusters; each
bears stone heart of scholarship,
fleshy pulp of experience.
The most upright branch casts a shadow
on the steepest spire of philosophy
whilst the lowest bower dips to anoint
itself in forgotten slum water.
The fruit is sweet. The fruit is sour.
The fruit is wild, to bend
the limbs low. Such is
the good and proper
education
of the great
Sherlock
Holmes.
A
golden
orb is the
fidelity
of Sherlock Holmes. Held
in two cupped palms, it shines
like a beacon, sustains like manna.
Much longed for, sought, even dreamt of,
through observation, experiment,
investigation, pillage and plunder,
both city and countryside, friend and foe,
text and telegram rent asunder
in holy, fev’rish pursuit of
that which hath no substitute.
The fidelity of
the great Sherlock Holmes
is and was and
shall ever
be to
truth.
The
charms of
Sherlock Holmes,
like his virtues,
are unequal: ripe,
velvet-skinned, cherub-plump
wit to amuse, enliven;
musicality to delight;
art in the blood manifesting in
strange and wondrous forms, both clinging and free.
The remorse of Sherlock Holmes is a clump
of seedy, bee-bitten, port-coloured
berries. Too rare to be hidden,
too sharp to be sweet, far too
telling to be false, borne
of ego and pride,
begetting both
bowed head and
bended
knee.
The
esteem
of Sherlock
Holmes rests in
a brimming basket
of sweet-scented rubies for
the clever, loyal, quick and true,
once bestowed, then preserved in sugared
memory like a late summer’s embrace.
Mysteries, puzzles, in a silent dog
or a misplaced hat, in ancient text,
modern cipher; in a song scratched
on paper or coaxed from strings;
the smoke of a new pipe;
the weight of old silk;
Watson. These are
the great loves
of the great
Sherlock
Holmes.