After Apple-Picking - 31 Dec 2016

"After Apple-Picking" is a poem by Robert Frost. It's hard to put down in a short post what we had been through in 2016. It has been an intense year, a year of many crossroads in our natural and spiritual lives. We're not at liberty to share these personal moments here, perhaps this poem can do a far better job to express our minds, emotions and feelings in much more than words and what the pictures painted. We're still going through many of those issues, and the hour is late.....

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 

Toward heaven still, 

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 

Beside it, and there may be two or three 

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 

But I am done with apple-picking now. 

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight 

I got from looking through a pane of glass 

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 

And held against the world of hoary grass. 

It melted, and I let it fall and break. 

But I was well 

Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 

And I could tell 

What form my dreaming was about to take. 

Magnified apples appear and disappear, 

Stem end and blossom end, 

And every fleck of russet showing clear. 

My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 

The rumbling sound 

Of load on load of apples coming in. 

For I have had too much 

Of apple-picking: I am overtired 

Of the great harvest I myself desired. 

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 

For all 

That struck the earth, 

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 

Went surely to the cider-apple heap 

As of no worth. 

One can see what will trouble 

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 

Were he not gone, 

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 

Or just some human sleep.