She was picking apples when she cried out
and felt a warm fluid on her leg,
and a clenching inside. Her basket fell
and she leant back against the tree,
slowly slithering to the earth as contractions came.
Short hours later her love-sister, sensing something,
raced through the fields to the orchard,
her hair streaming, and saw the new mother,
each hand in a fist round a windfall apple
against the pain, back supported by
the good solid trunk. The new baby keened
a little, then gurgled at the earth-sweet scent
of apple trees; slept, warmed to cidrous drowsiness
by the pink and heavy gold of sunset, and the joy
of all kinds of harvest and homecoming.
–
Cathy Bryant is the 2012 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and a former guest blogger for the Huffington Post. Her poems and stories have been published all over the world in such magazines as Night to Dawn and Midnight Times. Cathy co-edits the annual anthology Best of Manchester Poets, and her own collection, Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature was published recently. To contact her, email cathy@cathybryant.co.uk. The piece Apple Child was written after Cathy woke from a dream of it — feeling replete and joyful and smelling apples, but with a shivery edge to the experience.
–
hyacinth noir 