Three Apples - Richard King

[highlyeccentric]

I
Adam's: scrumped from the Tree of Knowledge;
the old man furious; Eve looking on;
the serpent heading back through the grass,
past the discarded core, now brown.

II
Newton's: buried in the grass at Woolsthorpe;
young Isaac sitting 'in contemplative mood';
about to spin from his dizzying orbit
and crash, brain-first, into a strange new world.

III
Turing's: half-eaten on the bedside table;
the other half turning to mush in the gut;
its sharp insinuation of cyanide
quickly decoded in the brilliant blood.

- From Best Australian Poetry 2012 ed. by John Tranter