Slicing and Dicing a Reverso

My daughter has some games on her iTouch that, typically, I couldn’t give a hoot about. In fact, I usually play the heavy when it comes to how much time is spent on electronic games. But when she invited me to try a game called Fruit Ninja the other day—and maybe it wasn’t so much the game, but that she invited me to play—I took a curious interest in this particular app. And then I got hooked on playing. It’s really kind of a silly game, where graphics of pineapples, coconuts, apples, watermelons and (bonus!) bananas float up and down on the screen. You get points when you swipe your finger across the images, as if you’re using a ninja sword, and cut the fruit in half before it falls out of sight. In the version we play, you have 60 seconds. You also have to try to avoid the bombs that get sent up in the mix of fruit (why bombs? why not, say, overly ripe fruit with worms or something?).

Whether it’s the up-and-down nature of the fruit images, or the fact that this is Poetry Month, with inspiration abounding regarding different poetic forms, I decided to take a stab (with my ninja sword) at a reverso. Marilyn Singer created this cool and challenging form, which is brilliantly featured in her book Mirror, Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse (illustrated by Josee Massee). With a reverso, the poem is written to make sense when read from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, with the meaning or voice shifting when you read it the reverse way. For about a year, I’ve been thinking about trying one of these poems.

So here’s a first swipe:

Off in one minute!
Better things to do!
Seriously,
slicing and dicing
cartoon fruit on a touchscreen,
going after
a high score
when you could be celebrating
all this fresh air,
spring’s arrival …
Who needs
Fruit Ninja?

Fruit Ninja!
Who needs
spring’s arrival,
all this fresh air,
when you could be celebrating
a high score,
going after
cartoon fruit on a touchscreen,
slicing and dicing!
Seriously,
better things to do?
Off in one minute …

—by Martha Calderaro

Yeah, far from polished, but it’s been a fun puzzle today. (And I got a new high score in the process! Really, it was research.)

Happy Poetry Friday! For more poems and great conversation about poetry, check out the roundup over at Madigan Reads.

Image by fotolia.