Poetry Friday: Going All Apple-y

"Behold, the apple's rounded worlds...."

Whenever a new year approaches, I get a little corny - or maybe I should say "apple-y." I want to post a poem with some gravitas to it - not just the Irish ditties or the jump-rope rhymes I'm drawn to under normal circumstances. After all, it's the end of one year, the beginning of another year - so the world turns, one kind of time fades, another kind of time entices.

Each December 31st, this apple-y feeling comes on like the scent of mulled cider - I can almost taste it, and it always leads me to Laurie Lee's poem, "Apples." It isn't the right season to be thinking of apples; still, I get more apple-y (or even "wanton," as Lee puts it) as each day of the lunatic old year finishes up. 

In this poem, Lee (whose Cider with Rosie, a description of life in the Slad Valley of the Cotswolds circa 1920, is not to be missed) recognizes the need to "take entire my season's dole" and welcome whatever comes, be it ripe, sweet, sour, hollow, whole. Life doesn't dish out any one of those things exclusively - it offers up the entire selection to you, to me, to the boy in the poem, to the stallion and starling, to the bent worm and the waltzing wasp. No one gets just the sweetness - life isn't like that - it's a "rounded" world. Yes, there are sweet bites; there's also the black polestar, and there's the rind with its crimson stain.

Still, don't we all want to greet life with the "easy hunger" Lee describes? So I offer "Apples" again - it's turning into my annual New Year's poem - as the year's opening post for Poetry Friday 2015. 

The round-up is being hosted by Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect - when you're done here, head there to see what other people have posted. And Apple-y New Year, everyone!

Apples

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:
juice-green of July rain,
the black polestar of flowers, the rind
mapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage red
burn to the sun’s hot brass,
then drop like sweat from every branch
and bubble in the grass.

They lie as wanton as they fall,
and where they fall and break,
the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,
the starling stabs his beak.

In each plump gourd the cidery bite
of boys’ teeth tears the skin;
the waltzing wasp consumes his share,
the bent worm enters in.

I, with as easy hunger, take
entire my season’s dole;
welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,
the hollow and the whole.

Laurie Lee as a young man...

...and older, walking through the hills above the Slad Valley.

Julie Paschkis's APPLE CAKE Is On the Table!!!

Well, it's September, and I have apples on my mind. Our apple tree branches are bending down, loaded with Liberty apples - an old-fashioned apple I love - and we can pick and gobble that luscious fruit whenever we like (and we do like, often.) So I'm thinking of apple poems - Robert Frost drifts up, of course, as do several nursery rhymes, but so do these lines (you can see the whole poem by Hattie Howard here):

Oh, the peach and cherry may have their place,
And the pear is fine in its stately grace;
The plum belongs to a puckery race
And maketh awry the mouth and face;
But I long to roam in the orchard free,
The dear old orchard that used to be,
And gather the beauties that dropped for me
From the bending boughs of the apple tree.
From the bending boughs of the apple tree.

One other reason for thinking about apples: Julie Paschkis's new book, Apple Cake: A Recipe for Love, has just been released by Harcourt, and - no surprise - it's wonderful. Such a sweet story, and it's good for all ages (makes a nice wedding/anniversaty gift, too) plus Julie added a recipe for apple cake on the end page. Yummmmmm. Here's the glowing review from Kirkus:

“Beautiful, kind, brilliant Ida… / always had her nose in a book.” So begins this lighthearted and airy tribute to the powers of love and persistence. Alphonse tries to be interesting, but he is unable to get Ida’s attention. He presents her with bouquets and butterflies and serenades her with guitar music, but still her eyes never leave the pages. He makes a cake, which turns into quite a production indeed. Paschkis takes a marvelous detour from her familiar style here. The pages are open, filled with white space and almost translucent gouache colors. Readers see Alphonse going to the ends of the earth for the ingredients: riding a horse up a mountain for apples, harvesting butter from the sun and sugar from clouds, climbing a tree to grab an egg from a nest, spooning salt from the sea and catching flour and baking powder from the sky. If all this weren’t enough to prove his love, Alphonse dives into the bowl himself to stir the cake! The smell of the cake baking eventually gets Ida’s attention, releasing a flood of butterflies and sunshine onto the final pages. Sweethearts of any age will celebrate the joy of love and shared simple pleasures. 

Hooray for simple pleasures! Fall is just around the corner - so write an autumn poem and bake some apple cake!

Happy apple eating, everyone!

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The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted this week by Katya Czaja over at Write. Sketch. Repeat. Head over there to see what other people have posted.

Poetry Friday: February, Frost, Cold Pink Ladies

As a native Washingtonian, I never thought I'd say this, but I do find myself wondering as I get older why I'm not living in a place where the sun shines more predictably. I don't mean the desert - that takes a sturdier, tougher soul than me. The sky in the desert is wide and lovely, but the land is mean. No, I like things generous: I'd love to look out and see a field of sunflowers, with blue sky overhead, instead of dormant and sad-sack Seattle in February. Maybe it's because so many friends and family have been traveling to Mexico, Hawaii, Italy this winter - I find myself dreaming of guayavas in Patzcuaro and pineapples in Kauai. I want to hold a vine-ripened tomato - the kind you find for sale in the Campo de' Fiori market stalls in Rome in June - up to my nose and just inhale the peppery smell of the vine. Sunshine, sunshine, give me some sunshine! But no....

Oh, dear.

Well, here is a little reminder from Robert Frost that cold is needed, even by the orchards that will give me some of the sun-ripened fruit I crave. Brrrrrrrrrr.....it's hard to wait. But when I bite into a Pink Lady apple in August, I'll taste February in it, won't I? And I guess Spring is not that far off.....

Almost....

Good-bye, and Keep Cold

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark

And cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call

I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.

"How often already you've had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an axe—

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard's arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

                                        -Robert Frost

Yes, glorious, glorious, glorious!

The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being hosted by Myra at Gathering Books. Head over there to see what other people have posted!  

And don't forget to check the other blogs I participate in - Books Around the Table (my writers group) and Write at Your Own Risk (written by faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts' Writing for Children program.)