Malus

On a drab afternoon's walk I was enchanted to come upon a small apple tree, almost leafless but with apples still on the branches, unpicked by any human hand. The hanging fruit was ravaged with blight and blemish but still rosy and, judging by the gnawed and scattered fragments on the ground below, sweet and juicy too. Cracked and scarred and mis-shapen, each apple was unique in its imperfection like a very old face.

Once upon a time it was not unusual to find a worm (or grub) when you bit into an apple. You would either spit out the offending inhabitant or nibble delicately around it. Now, supermarket apples are gleaming spheres of perfection, flawless, worm-free but devoid of flavour too. Plumped up with nutrients, picked too young and stored at low temperatures they are as far from these irregular specimens as glossy media darlings are from real people.

I spent an age photographing each apple but left them for the birds, bugs and squirrels to complete the natural cycle of ingestion, digestion and defecation.

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