Five a Day
Iona Mandal
What is it? Notoriously popular health standards?
For optimal health, we need a rainbow
of nutrients and colours.
Every telly screen and magazine,
plastered with moralising glow ups every day.
Red.
We eat our cascading pomegranate seeds
as if they are jewels.
Yet, squirm at the sight of blood stains
on bathroom linoleum.
We have learnt to worship gems,
but not reality that it’s healthy to bleed.
Orange and Yellow.
That oddly blended smoothie
forced down the throat.
Yet, we have no time
to pull the blinds
to soak in the sunshine.
So we craftily convincing our taste buds,
to make believe that goodness is often pain.
Yet, eyes blind to the beauty,
we are bestowed with.
Green.
A heap at the corner of our plate.
The dwindling, ghastly foliage
of times we live in.
We watch our gardens wilt,
grow grey hairs without care.
Crooked vegetables removed
from supermarket shelves.
Nature left to decay,
Eve no longer stealing the forbidden fruit.
Blue and, indigo
The awkwardly unnatural hues,
running through our veins
of food that is cold and blue
yet treated as if royal.
And, last but not the least,
White.
Of pills and tablets we do not need,
but substitute for the kaleidoscope of colours
we are to blind
to see through.
So gulp down the rainbow
of acid rain, famine and LED lights.
Variety and colour in every gulp
Eat your rainbow, as the adverts scream,
believing in the food revolution!