William Prindle has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest

The Orchardist’s Lament

If I spent less time
in unstructured circumspection
and dreadful inference

I might remember
that circumference is nothing
but pi times diameter

and I might not have to rue
the mismeasurements I make
in fencing these apple trees

from noisy birds and sneaky
squirrels. I might not keep
repeating what a dolt

to myself as I continue
to overlook my own advice
and nurse my sore thumbs

from recutting and rebending
this eighteen-gauge wire,
when all these years I could

have eaten bushels of Yeats’
apples simply by dropping
a berry in a stream at dusk

William Prindle is a poet deepening his voice in the third half of life. His poetry collection Medicine Cache Under Lichen (Finishing Line Press, 2025) is available through New Dominion Books and Amazon. He hosts the Charlottesville Live Poets Society, winning multiple Poetry Society of Virginia awards, and has been published in several journals and anthologies, including the 2021 Streetlight Magazine Anthology.