Blackberry Picking

When berries arrive, you know that summer is in full swing. We went blackberry picking this weekend, amazed at the prospect of free food growing wild along the streets of our hometown.

After a half hour or so of foraging, we fully understood why berries command such a steep price at the grocery store. Thorns had scraped and poked our fingers, arms and legs; territorial ants had protested our thievery; and juices from the berries had leaked all over our hands, staining them the color of blood. Berry picking was free, but it wasn't easy.

The experience reminded me of a poem I studied in high school Literature class- "Blackberry Piking" by renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I thought I would share it with you. To me, it evokes quintessential summer memories of childhood, as well as bittersweet sadness at the transitory nature of youth and innocence.

Blackberry Picking
by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

The English Major's Dirty Secret - Revealed!

I am an English major. I am of a romantic and emotional nature. I have frequently lived vicariously through films, music and literature. In college, I related with the main character of Amelie as a fellow introverted would-be altruist. The music of Muse, My Chemical Romance and other various and sundry emo bands supported me through difficult break ups. The Russian novel Anna Karenina showed me the mistakes I’d made in past relationships and taught me how a successful relationship works.

With all of this art appreciation, you might naturally assume that poetry would be right up my lane. Yet Keats, Whitman, and Coleridge perplexed and befuddled me for the most part while I studied them in college. Through research, I gained an admiration for their technical skill and imagination, but this sentiment was not the pure emotion of appreciation and kinship that I feel through other forms of art. And dare I confess... Most of the time, I am left with this sneaky suspicion that I'm missing something, or at worst - I just don't get it.

Before you take away my BA in English in outrage, let me assert that there are some exceptions to this anti-poetry sentiment. Every now and then, I will read a line of iambic pentameter that resonates in my soul. I do enjoy some works by Pablo Neruda and T.S. Eliot, for example. I collect the poems that I do enjoy in a notebook. Here is one such poem, shared with me by my friend Allison Felshaw. This captures how I feel at this time of life - married to a sweet man, enjoying the festivities of the holiday season.

Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
And disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
It too could wake up filled with possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
And love even the floor which needs to be swept,
The soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness,
You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
For the moon, but continues to hold it, and to share it,
And in that way, be known.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Note on the author: Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. She currently resides in Texas, although she was raised both in this country and in the Middle East. According to poetry.com, she "gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit".