Poem of the Day: ‘The Apple Pickers’

Lisa McCabe positions a father and daughter in an Edenic apple orchard. The father, with his knowledge of good and evil, bends all his will to keep his child from falling.

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Like yesterday’s Poem of the Day by A.M. Juster, today’s selection continues both the Sun’s celebration of living poets and the theme of fathers and daughters. Lisa McCabe, currently resident in Lahave, Nova Scotia, has published poems, reviews, and criticism in The Sewanee Review, The North American Anglican, Trinity House Review, and many other outlets. Here, in tetrameter quatrains with rhymes on the second and fourth lines of each stanza, she positions the father and daughter in an Edenic apple orchard. The father, with his knowledge of good and evil, bends all his will to keep his child from falling.  

The Apple Pickers 
by Lisa McCabe 

Targeting the topmost branches, 
in three quick steps he climbs the ladder, 
grasps the last rung with his free hand, 
the other hoisting up his daughter 

who leans out to pick the reddest apple 
that hangs there like a chancel light; its glow 
bright, inviolable, enchanted 
with what she seeks but does not know. 

And he would hold her there forever; 
taut, all potential, unaware 
of good and evil, sweet and bitter, 
tethered between the earth and air. 

She strains to pluck her piece of heaven. 
He turns in fear of heights unspoken. 
She will not slip from grace or tree tops. 
He stoops to save the bruised and broken. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.


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