Don't speak to me of those droughted days
when you reigned over me for twenty years.
Your dark clouds planted themselves
above my garden like seeds wanting
to rebirth a strangled youth.
I sickled down row after row:
your bindweed, your choke pear.
Purple flowers strung about my neck;
those bitter fruits, I swallowed whole:
a peck of yoke, two bushels of anguish.
A choke pear is not only an astringent fruit, hard to swallow, but also a medieval torture device, a type of gag. and from the French idiom: avaler des poires d'angoisse ("swallow pears of Angoisse/anguish") meaning "to suffer great displeasures".