Blackberry-eating

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Now that the weather has changed, just thought I would share this poem by Galway Kinnell. I love blackberries (we actually have them in El Salvador, we call them ‘moras’ and make fresh fruit juice and the best popsicles with them..), in fact I never met a berry I didn’t like, though I’m particularly fond of blueberries, blackberries and strawberries. Raspberries are good too, but sometimes too tart. Now that there’s a cool edge to the wind this poem makes sense in Houston…I love fall, I especially loved the cold air and the smell of burning wood in the fireplaces carried by the wind outside…and the blue blue skies and of course the brilliant leaves….so here it is:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

~Galway Kinnell, 1980