The season is winter, but the weather is autumnal and unusually warm. At the green market in New York City’s Union Square, apples of all varieties are piled up and plied in slices on passersby. In Australia, researchers at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, have located the gene that turns apples red. (The ruddy fruit’s colorful hue is due to anthocyanins, plant compounds that also act as antioxidants.) So it seems a good moment to consider a poem about a pomme, specifically:
The Apple
By James Crowden
The apple is a saucey little item,
Daughter of blossom, sits neatly in the palm,
Exquisite in its pert roundness
And asking to be admired and handled.
Look for instance at the much forgotten stalk
The secret timing of its fall from grace
The gravity of the situation, the earthly grasp
Or else the apple of your eye cradled in the sun,
Plucked in perfection from the tree of life,
The rosie skin that takes a shine,
Protects the inner flesh, firm and crisp and even,
Till young mouths are brought into play,
And teeth sunk into sweet sharpness,
The hint of summer lost in autumn,
Each subtle fragrance stored within the mind,
A host of memories, the DNA of myth, the pips,
Eve’s gift, a timely signal carried down the ages,
Sanctuary in miniature, sliced through,
The source of secret divination yields a fertile mind,
The inner core, now discarded, thrown away,
Rises up again, a shadey orchard meeting place
For slender youth, the tree itself
A secret assignation with the golden bough,
A song bird within a garden walled
Note: James Crowden is a poet and writer living in Somerset, England. He has worked as a shepherd, sheep shearer, cider maker and forester. His books include Blood, Earth & Medicine: A Year in the Life of a Casual Agricultural Labourer (The Parrett Press, 1991) and Cider: The Forgotten Miracle (Cyder Press Two, 1999) in which The Apple first appeared. In 1999 he was named poet laureate of Apple Day, an annual celebration of apples and orchards organized by the British environmental group Common Ground and held every year on October 21st. The Apple is reprinted here with kind permission of the poet.
