Hello Blog Readers! This is poem I wrote a couple months ago, but it seemed good to share now that fall in the air. It is a sestina in form, meaning the repeating end words of the stanzas provide the rhythm and form.
Bobbing Apples
There were children here yesterday.
You can still see their pool toys bobbing,
Floating like bubbles on the water’s surface.
I stir it, with my hand breaking the ethereal tension.
The moment shatters into an echo
Which is amplified retrospectively by the pine trees,
The moment is received by the apple trees.
I picked off most of the fruit yesterday
But I dropped and bruised one apple, and heard it echo,
In the grassy fibers, it stays bobbing
Inside me I feel an ancient tension
Compelling me to take a bite. I leave it on the surface.
I buried that memory beneath the surface
Spurning the thought of both fruit and trees,
That fallen apple on the ground fills me with tension
Even though it happened as long ago as yesterday,
In my mind I see many apples endlessly bobbing
Up and down. The ripples from the apples echo,
Apples call to me from the past with an echo
Recalling my childhood when my face broke the surface
Splashing the bucket water and ending an apple’s bobbing
With the bite of my teeth, knocking it from the trees,
But I picked it only yesterday?
While others hang by their stems in tension.
I was too tired to break the tension
Those forgotten hanging apples haunt me like an echo,
But I picked them all down yesterday.
Surely I can walk outside and pick the fallen fruit off the
earth’s surface
If only I could see the forest for the trees.
Instead, I float in my backyard pool, bobbing.
As a child I did more swimming than bobbing
Moved my hands though the water to disrupt tension.
As an adult, I just float on and look at the pine trees,
Out front an apple drops and its falling creates an echo
Sending ripples through the fibers of the grassy surface
I stir the water in the pool and whisper, “yesterday”
I continue my bobbing, each movement an echo
The apples still know tension just below the surface
Most of the apple trees lost their fruit yesterday.
Most of the apple trees lost their fruit yesterday.
Daniel Gillespie, August 2015
