crab apple
A poem about crab apples and self-acceptance, when who you are doesn’t seem to be ‘enough’ in someone else’s eyes.
Poem
crab apple
by Maya
Clustered.
My kin and I adorn each and every limb,
snow-capped in the literal sense:
fluffy white hats worn a thousandfold.
Our round red faces beneath reach for pink
the way winter reaches back for autumn,
any semblance of colour
beyond this blank-canvas white.
We are beautiful,
at least I’d like to believe that:
the sweetest harvest
when all other branches lie bare
(the ones through which you tumble).
You’re back
and wearing that scarf you’ve yet to grow into.
It still dwarfs your round red face.
You don’t leave clean footprints
as you trot closer.
It’s the snow that must part in your wake,
that shakes itself free as you reach up;
take your pick.
I sit neat in your palm,
ungloved skin now pink in the cold.
My own is frost-gilded,
glitters like a stray Christmas bauble.
We are two of a kind,
perfect miniatures.
It will not last.
(The wind, it bites
like milk teeth through frozen flesh.)
You will outgrow this.
You will learn to leave neat footsteps in snow
and your boots by the door.
You will heed grown-up warnings
and accept a grown-up frame.
You will leave this all behind
when you must crouch instead of tiptoe to find me.
You will soon enough look for more
and ask why you ever wanted less.
You have yet to bloom
and I am all I can ever be.
I will not blame you for this.
I will deal with what I’ve always been
when I meet your grown-up eyes,
a face no longer round but still red in the cold.
I will sit too small against the lines of your palms,
unchanging
unfaltering.
I will be as I’ve always been
and you will leave your perfect footprints in crisp white snow,
scour your supermarket aisles for that which fits
neat in a grown-up grasp.
My kind and I will remain as we always are:
a thousand red faces,
lone harvest of the cold.
But for now,
in newborn hands,
I am enough.
Epilogue/Author's Statement
A poem about crab apples and self-acceptance, when who you are doesn’t seem to be ‘enough’ in someone else’s eyes.
Crab apples:
Varieties of wild apple that are smaller than normal apples, and still edible to humans. Native to most parts of the northern hemisphere, and has a fruiting period that lasts into winter.
The core (pun intended) of this poem is the loneliness of being read as lesser than for the things about yourself you cannot change. It would be lonely to be a crab apple in winter, even more so when judged by the standards of a regular sized apple. These fruits exist on two different scales, and should be valued as such.
The same can be said for people. Who you are, however small you feel and however othered your nature makes you, is enough.
