The Forest's Apples

Once, beyond anyone's memory there were
farms cultivated adjacent the forest where
seeds from apple trees travelled on the
wind and the wings of birds, or adhered on
the fur of small animals, to sprout on the
rich humous of the forest floor, on the slopes
of the ravine's hillsides and by the time the 
farms had been utterly transformed becoming 
a vast urbanized area there were the feral
apple trees ensconced in groves among
the pines and the spruce, the oaks and the
willows, bearing their fruit year after year
These days urban dwellers living alongside 
the ravined forest where those farms once 
stood and whose houses are built over the
cultivated land take their leisure walks along
and through the woodland trails and during
the fall months pluck ripening apples from 
the copses of trees grown to maturity from
those apple seeds, incongruous among
cedars, hawthorns and poplars, so eager to
taste fruit fresh from the forest's offerings
they bite into hard, astringent fruit of hugely
diminished size in search of those that are
sweet and juicy and visually unblemished
recalling their childhood days of discovery 
and intrigue in nature's preserves before 
nature's preserve was so unceremoniously 
invaded, its creatures shunted elsewhere.