“Full round apple, peach, pear, blackberry.
Each speaks life and death
into the mouth. Look
at the face of the child eating them.
The tastes come from afar
and slowly grow nameless on the tongue.
Where there were words, discoveries flow,
released from within the fruit.
What we call apple – dare to say what it is,
this sweetness which first condensed itself
so that, in the tasting, it may burst forth
and be known in all its meanings
of sun and earth and here.
How immense, the act and the pleasure of it.
Sonnets to Orpheus I, 13 by Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in A Year with Rilke by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
Chorlton Unitarians 