Make me lovely like an apple tree that bows beneath her fruit. Lively, arching, twisting, bending, sending down her root. She dances to the tempest and smiles in the breeze. Laughing, she feeds a hundred children swinging in her leaves. She flowers every spring then bears a hundred apple pies. Cider, sauce, jams and salads—all each fall she yields her prize. Then swiftly, softly, drops her golden drapes, and for each winter dies.
Make me pretty like a paintbrush smeared in every shade. Shaping colored bits of chaos, the Painter’s hand obeyed. Make me something making something lovely: the image of an apple tree. A canvas tells a story—make me tell of Three.
Would you make me winsome as a wedding skirt that rolls along an aisle? Fresh as daisies in the dew. Oh, make me younger every mile. Clean like sun-baked bed sheets newly off the line. Miraculous and sweet—a Sunday morning’s breakfast time.
Make me as mesmerizing as an archive full of ancient books, rich in tales of Peter Pans and ocean gales for Captain Hooks. Likewise, teach me how to lavish little ones in stories. Stories grand and old, of pirates and uncovered gold, of Your one hundred thousand glories.
Give me the beauty of a crucifix, dripping red with wine. Where the Son of Man was lifted up, His life was bled, and sinners come to dine.
Make me lovely, for His arms stretched high above me. Make me pretty like the crimson etched into His cross. Winsome like the way he walked that Sunday Morn. As mesmerizing as the scars from every thorn. Give me beauty, like the waves washing up upon the sand; making breakfast by the holes driven through each hand.
Make me lovely like an apple tree. Like the tree on which He hung for you—on which he hung for me.
Teach me how to dance to tempests and to smile in the breeze. To laughing, feed a hundred lambs, and weeping, feed the one who grieves.
Make me lovely like an apple tree. Oh, let me live and breathe and bathe myself in Thee. And when at last this flesh has passed and gone to dirt, let me first, I pray, don my finest wedding skirt.
Frightfully good! *British accent*
I love it, tho. The vividness and Jesus references are 🤌🏻
What stayed with me wasn't the desire to become beautiful, but the desire to become fruitful. The apple tree is lovely not because it is admired, but because it bends under the weight of what it gives away. That quiet reversal gave this poem its deepest beauty.