Sunday, July 13, 2008

Don't forget to eat as many berries as you can while you pick them!

We hope to be picking berries this week. Many of our friends are a week or so ahead of us in the berry department, if the offerings at this weekend's farmers market are any indication. In honor of all this berry picking, I must share one of my favorite poems by Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet:

BLACKBERRY PICKING

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, 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.

Seamus Heaney

2 comments:

CountryDew said...

Yum! Blackberries.

kat said...

OK, you will not believe this and maybe I have already told you this, but Stop and Shop has planted blueberry bushes in the parking lot. We have been to pick berries twice and the first time we met a noble elderly man who said that he came to gather twice a week. You just never know where the berries will appear.

kat