In the Orchard, Underfoot, poem by Francesco Levato

and the air crisp like steel cuts as breath
through the death dry rattle of leaves.

It is a time that weighs
like the burden of harvest; the acceptance
of return from what we have sown.

And it is a time of numbers,
of the counting of days until the trees stand bare;
of the questions that mount

from another man’s orchard,
in another man’s war,

where the ground shoulders more
than the falling of fruit.

Does it matter, the difference from a bushel
to a peck, from thirty thousand bodies
to twenty times that sum

or whether their eyes
were turned toward the sky, or if their heads
laid wherever they fell

like a spilling of apples left crushed underfoot?