The heaping apple cart
tips over, the rolling hopes and expectations
jostle and fall,
bounce along roads,
lost to us now

We can’t even begin
to gather them back,
and the cart is broken anyway,
one wheel following the apples down
careening and ringing like a coin

And it makes no sense to us
to go back, to start over —
What would it be to us, at this point?
So in the aftermath
we wait to be lifted,
our lives to be borne
along a different arc.

©Wendy Mulhern
May 10, 2018