The Poets and The Apple Tree

We bring plates of food and wine
and our poems and plant ourselves
around her garden on creaky chairs or on the grass,
rows of vegetables growing nearby,
writing their own poetry on the evening air.
While the dog makes friends with some children,
running after them, tugging at a sock,
we are in thrall to the apple tree blooming above us,
its gnarled branches venerable evidence
of its struggle to prevail
as, one by one, the poets speak their words
or read those of others,
moving us with what we all go through,
the losses, the joys, the yearnings
and most of all, the too ripe pain,
the unnameable that falls outside the poems,
like the apples on the ground,
the ones that never make it into pies.


by Barbara Wolf (2007)