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Apple Tree
Star Coulbrooke

Corner of the front yard
where farm kids had a lot of room
to play and swing, where we
screamed just to scream,
hanging by our fingers
from thick limbs, bark-scraped,
in need of ladders.

Apple tree, then spruce
which never shaped-up to be much
even after the apple died.
Fifty years hence at fifty feet tall
it's still a scrubby thing,
scratched bare underneath
by peacocks and turkeys.

That corner where we were kids
and the hot sun beat down
on that apple tree long gone
and the bees with their honeybags
dragging, so full of pollen.
Salt in the green bites later.

Later we fell from scarred
limbs. Later I led the stubborn
farm pony under the branches
to scrape my sister off his back
and then, much later,
Dad chopped it down.

Chopped it down, dead already.
It never yielded apples
good enough for sauce.
Shaded by the morning
mountains, that corner.
Not even a spruce can thrive.



Published in Thin Spines of Memory  

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