Revisionist Poetry – The Apple Tree, v.3

Early autumn—school bell, a playground clotted with jackets.
The out-of-bounds field bristles with burrs; yet the low apple tree wins us.
Its limbs hang like small promises.

We climb to become kings, to make crowns of high, wind-thin branches,
counting power not in coins but in apples—bright, lacquered tokens—
ripe only in the dreaming tongue; never for the mouth.

Ogres and crones—coat-collared adults, shadowed teachers—patrol the edge;
some children turn away. The rest keep the game, reckless.
Only the sirens (a bell, a shout) pull the crowned ones down,
and still, the tree keeps its small kingdom: a laughing, sticky, impossible joy.