Fruit of the Forgotten Hedgerow – The Crab Apple – a poem by Martin Towers

Fruit of the Forgotten Hedgerow -
The Crab Apple


I was a crab apple – hard, small, sour. 
I made sunny, expectant faces twist and disfigure
at the taste of me, so that I was dropped 
at the track edge and could rot myself down 
into the soil and rise again from my seed.

I was nothing much at all - except I had 
something, I had something, that my fruit-bowled, 
my pocketed cousins could only dream of. 

And the lovely Scarecrow - he, at least, 
would always take me, and chew at me; 
his lovely face, his grin, never changing.
His eyelids never closing on his ecstatic gaze.

Martin Towers is a support worker in Aberystwyth, Wales. His poems have been published in Crannog, Banshee and The Galway Review.