With All My Senses Awake

Mystic
by D. H. Lawrence

They call all experience of the senses mystic,
when the experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple,
I am called mystic, which means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down I call the feeding of corpses.


The Poetry Friday round-up is at Two Writing Teachers

P.S. I'm going on vacation today and won't be back until the day of the total solar eclipse. I have scheduled posts to go up while I'm gone. It's like leaving a little robot helper in charge. See you when I get back!