Sunday, April 7, 2013
Sunday Night Poetry
Not Wanting to Leave This Place
Frail in the cups, his seedlings are placed
Under the cold frame next to the house's
Foundation where April's sun hatched them
In moisture and peat, their plumules reaching
Green. My father misses nothing bending
To their radicle needs. Tomatoes, peppers
And beans he weeds, hand picking the imperfect
From the perfect, plumped for the worms
He'll spray; these are his prizes. Following
behind him I am told to pull up lamb's quarters
And chickweed that are wild around each
Root. With trowel and claw I kneel to the dirt,
Pebbles imprinting my knees. Wanting to
Stop but not wanting to leave this place, his
Plot, where he raises my food up through the soil.
Each day, I watch him lean onto the spade turning
Over the clumped loam where there'll be a second
Planting; he will love the white and yellow blossoms.
If he looked up he would see me watching. Carefully
He moves among the rows, not to bruise the new fruit.
--S.K.
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3 comments:
__________ Picking Berries __________
Parked beside a lane with lilies lined
Instinct drives us to the fragrant fields
Carrying buckets to our task resigned.
Keeping up with Nature’s bounty yields
In summer morning’s warm, earth-scented mist
Nostalgic sweet refreshment from the soil.
Gleefully we gather berries kissed
By sunshine, plump with rain before they spoil.
Edible, these gems that fill our pails
Remain, once tasted, as a lifelong treat.
Remembrance fond at “Realism” rails.
It knows behind our stated urge to eat,
Each one of us who picks collects delights
Stored to ease the future’s endless nights.
~ FreeThinke, The Sandpiper, Summer 1996
FT, your poem brings me back to those humid summer days picking blackberries in the fields behind our property.
Your poem reminded me that Galway Kinnel wrote one about blackberry eating:
'blackberry eating' by galway kinnell
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
And your poem, Ms. Shaw, reminded me of the berry picking adventures chronicled -- and even more about the wonder of my father's lovingly tended Victory Garden behind the rental property where we lived when I was a very small boy. A wonderful place! There were six apple trees at the rear of the big yard behind the Victory Garden, and a patch of wild blackberries next door surrounding the tumbled down barn that had been part of a deserted farm that once covered several square blocks.
My dad cultivated some of those blackberry bushes, so I too remember braving the brambles to fill a pail or two in the hot August sun. We enjoyed wild ones too when vacationing on Long Island, but we ate those as fast as we could pick them.
Great days! My mother made seemingly endless cobblers, pies and tarts from the apples and berries, and blackberry jam and jelly. Lots of home canning back then -- an experience mother shared with a couple of great aunts.
I wish people still did things like that. No one seems to have time anymore, do they?
We're all too busy tending our blogs, I guess. ;-)
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