Thread: Freshtival
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Unread 01-15-2022, 03:45 PM
Sarah-Jane Crowson's Avatar
Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2018
Location: UK
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Yay to Wassailing, and I'm very sad that your Morris isn't doing it this year. I hope that next year is kinder. I like your robin in this one, and the details of the Morris, which brings back nice memories.

On the plus side, during lockdown here (I live about a minutes walk from an apple orchard), orchards came into their own, with teenagers having
- not house - but orchard parties - groups of six of them sitting under the trees drinking cider in both an unruly and curiously gentle ruly (if that is a word) way.

Here's my very first-draft apple-tree text (not a poem yet), written way back when in The First UK Lockdown (when no trains ran, and all birds sang). Italicised text from a history of apple trees.


Orchard Apple


To offer us different stories in the face of media bias

Escaped wild trees
hide in hedges, while serried rows of cider apples
are shot at by wassailers and preachers in remote places.

In homely gardens the garden apple grows, dessert apple,
earthy pink-dredged blossom
humming and purring with myriads of bees.

You are snail-shod each Autumn
when the air smells of burned paper.
Thousands of lost varieties lie cramped in a dozen heavy Pomonas,
illustrated by careful, half-forgotten women
with ink-stained fingers.

Your shadow shelters Angelica, Dandelion, Chickweed. You are red
and green or gold, with crisp sweet or feathery-soft golden flesh.
Each apple keeps differently.
An ancient tree hides near each abandoned place
to storytell old orchards.

When unpicked, your dried up fruit wizens on the branch
like a lantern, lights us through Winter, ready for unleafing.


Some ryght soure and some ryght swete
with a good savoure and mery.
Helpful in dropsy.
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