The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Friday Poem on 31/03/23

We chose ‘Apple blossom’ by Jackie Wills to be our Friday Poem this week because it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Subtle half-rhymes chime and echo down its twelve lines – blossom / him, died / shades, thud / end, bring / dying / young – gently weaving the poem together. The apple trees laden with blossom and fruit are delicately described, and the parallels between the trees and the various parents in the poem are beautifully and deftly drawn. We love the poem’s conversational approach, its tone – compassionate, loving, meditative – and the scrap of hope inherent in “old wood doing its best again”. Lovely.

Apple blossom

The year Dylan’s mother died
I picked sprays of apple blossom,
wound its pink, off-white shades
in raffia for you to take to him.

Every year it’s out I think of us,
the children, how apples bring
the tree so low, until they thud
to the lawn, drumming the end 

of summer. The blossom was heavy 
when Dylan’s mother was dying – 
old wood doing its best again –
and he, like you, was so young.

Jackie Wills has published six collections of poetry, the most recent, A Friable Earth (Arc Publications 2019). In 2022 Smith|Doorstop published On Poetry, a handbook on reading and writing poems described as ‘indispensable’ by poet Sasha Dugdale. Rob Hamberger wrote, “Wills’s feminist and anti-imperialist framework gives her writing a beautiful urgency, packed with insight and clarity.” Wills has worked with many emerging writers; now you’ll find her on the allotment or making / mending clothes on demand.

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