Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

One perfect apple remained in the world, in the president's
                                                                        walled garden,
and it weighed so heavily on the man's mind, that neither
                                                                   senate nor summit
could distract him from idea-of-apple, almost real in the
                                                              strength of his longing.

He smelt his lost youth, which was sunlight decanted through
                                                                                    leaves,
someone calling from the porch, ladders propped against the
                                                                                   boughs,
an overalled man, tinged with the bloom of apples and
                                                             appleworld-weariness,

and this girl, lovely in Levis, doing an angel on the first
                                                                           crisped leaves.
He saw beyond her outspread arms, her 501s, to the New Eden
                                                                                      pilgrims
unloading hymns and a cargo of words; christening one
                                                                        season, The Fall.

But after all those Falls, after mom's bakes and vats that
                                                                                   brimmed
with applejack, after the ones rubbed to a shine at the hip,
it had come to this: a bauble dangling from a spared tree.

You know the rest. How the appletree shook; how the old man
                                                                                      sighed
and the angel-girl wept when the president clipped the fruit
                                                                             from its stalk
and its orchard past, and then, without remorse, peeled and bit
                                                                                         into it.