Bobbing Apples

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.

Daniel Gillespie, August 2015