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Flower and Come True / The End

from Crossing Paths with Johnny Appleseed by Jim Novak

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lyrics

TRACK TWENTY: Flower and Come True / The End

[SPOKEN]
John Chapman, “He lived for others,”
That is carved upon his stone
But along the Ohio up to the Mid-West
He paddled and hiked alone…..
Apple Johnny hey, Apple Johnny ho
Paddling his canoe on down the Ohio
Apple Johnny ho, Apple Johnny hey
A cloud of apple blossoms on a fine spring day

Richard Wilbur’s fine poem includes these lines:

Out of your grave John Chapman, in Fort Wayne
May you arise and flower and come true…
We are born into a wilder land than you….

That was a bit of Richard Wilbur’s poem “John Chapman.” It takes us from the green glades of his first nurseries in Pennsylvania all the way to Chapman’s last days in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he passed away at age 70. He was memorialized in the local newspaper. And eventually he got that gravestone that says “He Lived For Others.” If ours is a wilder land, of technology and social media, of continuing inequality in new and virulent forms, we can still look to the ideal of living for others. Johnny found his role, his own peculiar way of doing just that.

One final snippet before I go… Chapman would have known this one. From the Bible, the Book of Solomon. Chapman would have had the King James Bible, the one readily available on the frontier in his day. It goes:

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am full of love.

Stay me with flagons? If it’s a flagon of hard cider they’re talking about, I’ll take one! And then it says “Comfort me with apples. I am full of love.” Chapman… we think of him out in the woods and amongst his nurseries… he was full of love, infatuated with love of nature, covered in nature, expressing his love of nature. You can smell the apple blossoms.

And so we can think of him there, in his everlasting Garden of Eden, comforted with his apples, small and sour as they may be, spitters as they may be. But they do “arise and come true”, then and now, handsome as apples truly are, and a double blessing as apples truly are, that is, first the blossom and then the fruit.

We will work things out. We will work things out.

[SUNG:]
Wandering with a bag of dreams, beneath a thickening sky…
Sunshine follows the rain
So I believe even when I’m wet
What you give is what you gain
I’m a little bit ragged but I don’t forget
Sunshine follows the rain.

Apple Johnny hey, Apple Johnny ho
The most peculiar man along the Ohio
Apple Johnny ho, Apple Johnny hi
Smell the apple blossoms, on a fine spring day… and
Apples fall to earth beneath the autumn sky.




[THE END]

credits

from Crossing Paths with Johnny Appleseed, released April 20, 2021

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Jim Novak Ann Arbor, Michigan

Now work-shopping these Appleseed songs and stories into a one-man show. Singer-songwriter from Ann Arbor. Host of “Songwriters Open Mic” for over 25 years. Producer and videographer of half-hour TV programs, “Songwriters Open Mic Ann Arbor,” broadcast weekly from1996 to present (recent episodes on youtube). Former college teacher, program advisor, instructional designer for adult learners. ... more

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