Maine Senior College Network’s 2013 Poet Laureate:
Alice Bolstridge
Alice Bolstridge
Wild Apples
Through farm fields growing up to
woods,
we walk toward our hard-won
storied past
through open spaces left between
goods
of soft and hard economy forebears
faced,
evergreen for boards and pulp,
hard-wood trees
for fire. Looking for what can last,
we taste sour wild apples. They'll freeze,
sweeten, and feed deer that spread
seed through all the fields. Nature decrees
unstillness. The land, torn from forest
before our time, untended now for
years,
goes fecund with roaming, wind,
and unrest,
grows then into now and to be,
graced,
wild, and ever green with birth
and waste.
