Michael E. Stone: Don’t Eat Olives

Don’t eat olives in Armenia,

you get black ones with no taste.

Not Kalamata black,

with meaty, half-bitter flesh,

pungent and almost erotic.

Nor the really bitter pounded green olives

that leave the mouth alive and assault the senses

with the bitter taste of their land of birth,

my land.

In Armenia, eat as they do,

meat and salad and thin, thin bread,

yoghurt, cheese and apricots.

Just not olives.