We are born believing a man bears beliefs like a tree bears apples.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
On An Apple-Ripe September Morning
by Patrick Kavanagh
On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.
The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy’s haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight
To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.
As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shovelling up eels again.
And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.
The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.
I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill.
Maybe Mary might call round…
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.
American Sonnet for the Magic Apples
by Terrance Hayes
Or the one drunken half-quarter grand uncle recalling
The sound speckled apples on his fabled real daddy’s
Coastal orchard made falling multidimensionally
To the vaguely salty combination of plantation dirt
And marshland bearing the roots of this strange
Distant cousin to the plum, the Cherokee palm tree,
And West African pear, color of a bloody, dusky ruby,
Husky & almost as bulky as the lamenting lamb’s head
His daddy lopped off once & kicked at him laughing,
The uncle informed me wistfully at a reunion of family
Fleecers, fabricators, fairy tellers & makeup artists
With his cast-off awful alcohol stench burning my nostrils
As he gripped the back of my head & gazed deeply
At the speckled invisible apple or head in his hand.
Fourteen Lines 