A Sweet Affair

An orchard’s fruit and its aromas
are laden with sweet memories:
a windfall of sparkling baubles
or a bird café of dulcet squabbles
over worms in russet orbs that end
as feasts for feathered friends.

Each bite of your acidic sweetness
arouses a harvest of ripe blushes
beneath a tree, under cover of night.
‘I am sweet temptation in moonlight,’
your apple breath whispers again,
and we linger, despite the autumn rain.

Kim M. Russell, 4th February 2025

Image by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

For this Tuesday’s Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub, Dora would like us to reimagine the familiar.

Dora says that we’ve “We’ve seen talented and oftentimes anonymous artists create graffiti, taking the familiar sides of buildings and walls and reimagining them, creating memorable, though ephemeral, street art. Yarn bombing is a type of street art that covers a familiar public structure, a park bench or phone booth, defamiliarizing it with a display of knitted or crocheted yarn.”

We’ve seen novelists and poets do it, too, and Dora has given us some great examples by Louise Gluck, Rhina P. Espaillat, W.B. Yeats, Mary Oliver and Evan Boland, to inspire us to take something familiar and reimagine it in some way. She has even given us a list of suggestions.

I have reworked a poem I first posted on 29th April 2023 for NaPoWriMo.

37 thoughts on “A Sweet Affair”

  1. Ah, the romance of the apple, and “under cover of the night,” a “sweet temptation” unlikely to be resisted. I love how you played off the old Edenic trope and the first stanza’s “bird cafe” feast!

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