In this Poem, We Will Not Glorify Sunrise
nor admire the apples that blossom
during a February heat wave only to
wilt and die in a mid-May freeze. Doom,
such a fickle bitch. She’s snow spilling into
Reno where planeloads of people sick
of winter have gone to gamble in tank tops
and shorts. Here it’s seventy-three degrees,
warm enough to sunbathe on a Lake Ontario
beach. Overhead a jet pirouettes toward
the airport fluttering white scarves of vapor:
Contrails, kissing cousin to entrails. Mine
are glistening and pink as a sunrise except
for one rotten spot that’s something to watch
in the future. How it always starts for the apple.
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Freligh. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 10, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem started [from] a prompt—a challenge from a good friend to write a poem that refused to celebrate the beauty of nature. I immediately thought about climate change and how it’s affected life in my backyard. Along Lake Ontario in Western New York, that can be a hard freeze in mid-May or a warm day in February, both of which can be potentially catastrophic for the hundreds of apple growers in the region. A bit of trivia: New York grows more varieties than any other state, producing enough apples in a good year to bake five hundred million apple pies.”
—Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh is the author of five books, including the poetry collections We (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021) and Sad Math (Moon City Press, 2015), winner of the 2014 Moon City Poetry Award and the 2015 Etchings Press Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Rochester, New York.