MSCN 2013 Poet Laureate

Maine Senior College Network’s 2013 Poet Laureate:  
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.