Old Gravenstein, your boughs are scabbed and mossy
but you expand them graciously, a host
inviting passers-by to share the glossy
hospitality your bushels boast.
Your blossom spangled spring rain's spectrumed prism
and dropped; green stippled you and turned to reds
and golds. They coalesce—spring's pointillism
is smeared as autumn's flaring wildfire spreads.
Now fanning winds gust leaves—sparks float to earth
and apples fall like coals. They'll leave a tortured
candelabrum etched above a hearth
where ash still smokes—the frosted misty orchard.
Dusk. Across the mural of the sky
your portraitist depicts another scene:
he specks and flecks your boughs with nebulae
in blooms of carmine, salmon, gilt, and green.
And they too blend as space-dust avalanches
down columns light-years tall and then combines
in worlds that fall, like apples from your branches,
decaying as their core-stored sun declines.
Thus apple-trees and galaxies expire—
in dappled glades of universal fire.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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