Exploring the crabapple today, in its various wondrous avatars! Plus vondrous vords and books as always.

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The Very Wondrous Crabapple

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is inspired by Melissa Kwasny’s poem, “The Apple Tree in Blossom,” where she strings together several fantastical metaphors for the apple tree, before shifting into exclamations, definitions, and a series of nimble, tonal shifts – and seeming changes in topic – before circling around back to the apple tree. Today’s challenge asks us to write our own poem in which we use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which we opened the poem.

I looked at the crabapple tree

standing among others in the neighborhood nursery;
the pamphlet underneath sang to me in a list:
ancient healer of hidden harms,
witch-kettle whisperer,
a small sun caught in bark—

oh! which witches of old
cackled over cauldrons un-cold, chanting charms and curses
to fend off that cat who bothers my hummingbird friend—
leave her be!! leave her be!!

A red car, ready for a trip,
struck the knuckled trunk—
and there it was: the malus tree—
sprung—in the middle of the soccer field
(my son was playing a b-ball game there when it happened)—
as if roots could rewrite the ground,
as if it had always been there—

hidden binder of sweetness and bite—
verjuice, I read: the green, unripe truth of fruit,
a sour beginning, not yet ready, already itself—

and if you want something smaller,
look in the bonsai section:
malus halliana, a quiet catalyst,
a tree that practices being contained,
a vicinal thing—neighboring, nearly touching,
close enough to belong, not close enough to name—

I looked at the crabapple tree—

as if it had always been there

~ Vidya Tiru @ LadyInReadWrites

Vords

• Velleity — a wish or intention too weak to become action
• Verjuice — highly acidic juice juice from unripe grapes, crabapples, or other sour fruit
• Vicinal — neighboring; nearby
• Vuvuzela — a loud plastic horn often heard at sports events

V-Books

And Now, the End of This Post

Dear reader, as always, which book/word appealed to you? Any recommendations for me?