My Poem ‘The Apple’

At the bottom of my garden,
there grows a grand, towering, amazing, apple tree-
I still remember planting its seed in the ground when I was a child,
watering it for the first time with its first vital drops of water,
watching it grow year after year until its top branch grew so high
it looked like it could almost touch the sky
and too high for me to see.
I have had this fantasy for years
of climbing to the top branch of the apple tree
and picking the apple that lies the farthest out of reach,
returning it to my kitchen, chopping it up,
and baking it in an apple pie,
but the apple tree is so dense, precious,
and important to me, to our family,
I would hate to see even a single apple come to harm-
I don’t think I could live with myself
if it got sick or died.

As I stood looking up at the beautiful, majestic,
glowing, due-speckled, green, and red, apples,
as golden sunshine streamed through the apple tree’s branches
and cast a shadow on me, the wind blew delicately,
I heard the sound of breaking and then the sound of something
hitting nearly every branch on the way down
and falling from high above to the ground.
As I looked up, I could see the biggest,
and the greenest, apple that I had ever seen in my entire life,
fall like lightning from a thunder cloud.
I had just enough time to be able to catch a glance
at the great apple and reach out with my right hand
to catch it before it fell and touched the soil
covering the apple trees roots-
the apple was heavier than I expected,
and as it lay in the palm of my hand,
and as I considered what had to happen to make it grow so high
and then fall so far,
I had a revelation about life, about myself,
about what lies at the centre of us all-
human beings, birds, the Earth, as star,
as well as what can be found in an embryo,
or in an apple’s core,
and I instantly had this overwhelming urge to bit into the apple
and potentially taste and be reminded what is important in life:
how what grows above ground and below the Earth
is connected to everything that grows
in a thousand acres of rainforest, in every garden-
what flourishes and what can be found on the ocean floor.

I bit into the apple and the sweet taste of it skin
and the juiciness of its pulp overwhelmed all my senses
and took me back in my mind to the day, to the minute,
to the instant that I first put the apple pip into the soil,
all those years ago,
and I felt like I had witnessed, tasted, and had been gifted
something that I had never experienced before,
and it felt wonderful!

When I blinked my eyes, I was now at the foot of the tree again,
looking up, thinking abut the miracle that is growth
and the incredible significance, the insight,
what we can all learn about life
by witnessing the descent of a falling apple.

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