i have eaten apple-seeds
by Julia Wei, Korowa Anglican Girls’ School
Years 11 – 12 Written Poetry Finalist
Everyone lays eyes
upon this apple orchard –
summer’s alms soaked in sunshine, blushing baubles
swinging from bent boughs, green and heaving. No surprise
then, that I see that scene again:
the sweet perfume of an apple plucked ripe
from its leafy bed. *Snap.* Like that
a seed blooms into a flower, fruits and
flourishes, and from there can become
many things. This is the natural life
of an apple. I am picking
between apples. But how to cut
a sun-baked apple? First slice off
the cindered skin, check the white flesh
for pockmarks. Cleave the meat in two;
see the juice running clear with promise, or
a wormed-out hollow; fluid,
fetid. I gamble
on apples, and so does my sister – cupped carefully in the cradle
of her hand. Yet that palm was my palm, pen clutched within;
those dreams my dreams, spilling onto the page
from the gaps between my fingers, the glittered ink
of my childish scrawl. *I want to be a vet. I want
to fly a jet. Dancer, doctor, dentist.
Therapist. Marine Biologist.*
Yes – that was me, sat just yesterday
before the dining table, not wanting my vegetables. Do you remember?
Remember? Remember? Now I am grown and sensible and repulsed
by the bite of these apples –
but the juice flows.
Flows, flows and drips and runs
onto my hands, her hands, the hands of my mother
steeling themselves before the cutting board, the steady
stagnant thump of the knife coming down under the command
of her rust-polished fingernails. The apple-red of my father’s
bloodshot eyes, looking past the darkened doorstep, coming home
bearing the fruits they will never eat.
I can only eat.
Eat and eat
to the core, eat till the flesh is gone, eat till I reach
the heart – the jewel of its seedy eyes – seeing,
watching, wondering
what I will be.
What a privilege it is to pick. What a blessing
to agonise between choices, to want freely, to dream,
to swallow the seeds others have sown.
Now I stand in my orchard, grown and humbled
and look beyond the gate of the schoolyard – happiness resting
rounded red in this hand, this eye seeing apple-seeds
stretching onto infinity.