God's Sixth and a Half Day?

After eating and apple in a garden,
warmed by sunlight this afternoon,
and lazily tossing its skeleton in to the shrubs,
I was nudged by the elbow of possibility.

The potential of that casually discarded
collection of seeds.
What they might become.
And then it seemed such a waste,

that when we finally exchange our plastic lawn chairs
for the permanence of a wooden box,
hidden in the depths of the damp earth,
that we cannot do the same.

While our essence swims on in the ether,
our remaining lifeless shells could germinate
into a green and leafy existence
a botanical Lazarus, rising to the light,

emerging from the pointlessness of our tombs.
Each crowded cemetery
replaced by a teeming forest of life.
Every graveyard, a humid jungle

of chattering vegetation,
breathing life back into a gasping,
wheezing atmosphere.
The aged ones left behind,

will no longer soap down our headstones
twice a year, enduring a freezing drizzle
with a red bucket, a yellow sponge.
Released from obligation and guilt.

Yes they would sit in the shade of our branches,
listening to birds, leafing through old photographs.
Maybe reading aloud from an anthology of poetry,
compiled by a faceless writer,

a thousand miles away.
But now, here in the garden, the sun is dipping
behind a far off bank of Chestnuts -
which I had never noticed before.

And as my notepad closes,
I wonder who they may have been
and what might have been,
if humanity had been created as seeds
from a crisp green summer’s apple.