‘My [lightweight, three-piece] ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still’
and Robert Frost and I
have these two things in common: we write (he wrote) poetry
and we have (he had) apples by the ton.
Saint Martin’s summer’s sun
has blessed my harvesting, and now illuminates
dozens of wooden boxes, plastic crates
dotted round the orchard on the hill
and left until tomorrow to be barrowed in and stored.
Like him, I’m glad,
in a way, to see the business over with, to be allowed to stop.
One can get bored
admiring each warm, individual beauty in a massive crop.
He said he had
‘ten thousand thousand’ grade-one fruit;
in other words, ten million — a figure I’d dispute
but poets will and should exaggerate.
We’ve both had vintage years, at any rate.
And now the problem starts;
it’s always like this when a bumper season ends.
How many apples can I palm off on my friends,
make chutney of, turn into pies and tarts?
How long, oh Lord (till Christmas?) must we eat stewed apple (laced,
I will admit, with Calvados)
at lunch and dinner every day
in order not to feel a sense of loss
that one of Your free gifts has gone to waste?
It is, I know, effrontery
to bracket in a poem Robert Frost and me.
But let the minor poet have his say.
Robert, your talent is the ripest specimen a summer’s light achieves.
I’m up the ladder, on the topmost rung. It’s out of reach.
Mine’s green and runtish, low down, hidden in the leaves.
Yet we are each
wealthy this evening as we sit and write indoors.
Sleep well tonight, ‘whatever sleep it is’. One final piece of cheek:
I bet you, any day this sunlit week,
I’ve handled apples just as big as yours.