What Is the Fruit of Our Labor? In her poignant song, “Mercy Now,” Mary Gauthier writes, about her father, that the “fruits of his labor fall and rot slowly on the ground.” The image haunts me. Since it’s meant to be experienced, poetry loses something when we try to explain it, and yet I can’t help but wonder what this means. Is Gauthier saying that all the work he’s done over the years made no difference, that what he built has fallen apart? I think of an apple tree in a neighbor’s yard behind our house. Probably a hundred years old, the tree stands about 30′ tall, loaded with little,…