Ode to the Bakeapple
by Melanie Power
Winner of the 2025 Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem
Why invoke the apple at all, whose size
and rainbow of varieties dwarf
this modest fruit? Though the berry’s
beginning, it’s true, is apple-red, firm,
not born on a bush but low and sparse,
like a prophet parting the moss on marshes.
Elsewhere they call it cloudberry,
for its cumulus-like clumps,
but our language is tailor-made,
stolen or inherited, like the landscape.
The bakeapple, like blackberries,
unfurls as a bundle of spheres, though
diverges in hue from a day-old bruise.
The bakeapple is humble-coloured,
orange-yellow, no, nothing like gold.
Yet this fruit is not unlike a precious gem,
given its rarity, last year extorting 80 bucks a gallon,
and I knew someone who knew someone
who in Bauline found a good patch of some.
Of course, the Condons told no one.
For the bakeapple, to ripen is
to lighten, mellowing as it does
into a subtler, honey colour. But forget
notions of viscous sweetness — its taste is
no nectar. It is tang, thinner. Strange
how you shiver but this berry is a slap,
bitter. One is enough to flood the mouth
with the tart history of wind-haunted bogs,
the squelch of soles into wet ground,
stink of sea in hair, woods on all your clothes.
Unlike the deep-pored strawberry, adored
the world over, the bakeapple’s taste is acquired —
too much itself, like a teenager. Strong-willed,
as rejecting as the tundra from which
it was plucked. Those blessed with patience
hold out ’til end of season — overripe then,
they fall in sweet clots, too soft,
straight-up jam on the vine.
My cousin has a bakeapple tattooed
on her inner wrist, the private skin
where a lover might kiss, because we know
this berry is not just fruit, it is symbol.
A pain in the arse to pick, these berries hug close
to earth, occurring rarely in easy clusters.
It’s back-breaking work, your grandmothers know.
Not to mention the hours afterward,
your great aunt’s nimble fingers
culling the hull from each one
over a beef bucket, such tedium! Devilish
for a fruit to make you toil so much for a taste —
yet on every peninsula, we wait all winter
to smear fresh bakeapple jam onto buttered toast,
the marriage of marshy sweetness
with rich, milky salt.
Unlike blueberries, known to stain, hands
streaked with bakeapples wash quite clean —
their mark, like prayer, is
something hushed, internal.
— Melanie Power is a Montreal-based poet from St. John’s. Her debut, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, was published in 2022 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in oral history and creative writing at Concordia University.
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