Category: Stewardship

They lie
on the ground
after the deer
have left after the
bear has had her fill they

lie under the stars
and under the sun
in a cloud of brambles
the ripest ones
fall first
become black jam
in the thatch.

as a boy I hated
picking blackberries the
pail never full like
one half of a
slow
conversation.

Now
their taste
is sweeter
in memory
the insect buzz the
branches too high the blue
summer never quite
over before
the fall
begins.
~Richard Terrell from “Blackberries” from What Falls Away is Always

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 from “Blackberry Picking”

In the early morning an old woman
is picking blackberries in the shade.
It will be too hot later
but right now there’s dew.

Some berries fall: those are for squirrels.
Some are unripe, reserved for bears.
Some go into the metal bowl.
Those are for you, so you may taste them
just for a moment.
That’s good times: one little sweetness
after another, then quickly gone.

Once, this old woman
I’m conjuring up for you
would have been my grandmother.
Today it’s me.
Years from now it might be you,
if you’re quite lucky.

The hands reaching in
among the leaves and spines
were once my mother’s.
I’ve passed them on.
Decades ahead, you’ll study your own
temporary hands, and you’ll remember.
Don’t cry, this is what happens.

Look! The steel bowl
is almost full. Enough for all of us.
The blackberries gleam like glass,
like the glass ornaments
we hang on trees in December
to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.

Some berries occur in sun,
but they are smaller.
It’s as I always told you:
the best ones grow in shadow.
~Margaret Atwood “Blackberries” from Dearly 

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 “Blackberry Eating”

Blackberry vines are trouble 90% of the year – always growing where they are not welcome – reaching out to grab passersby without discriminating between human, dog or horse. But for a month in late summer and early fall, they yield black gold – bursting, swelling, unimaginably sweet fruit that is worth the hassle tolerated the rest of the weeks of the year.

It has been an unusually dry summer here in the Pacific Northwest with little rain until recently, so the fields are brown and even the usually lush blackberry vines have started to dry and color up. The berries themselves are rich from the sun but starting now to shrivel and mold.

Our Haflinger horses have been fed hay for the past several weeks as there is not enough pasture for them without the supplement–we are about 6 weeks ahead of schedule in feeding hay. I had grown a little suspicious the last couple nights as I brought the Haflingers into the barn for the night. Two of the mares turned out in the back field had purplish stains on their chests and front legs. Hmmmm. Raiding the berries. Desperate drought forage behavior in an extremely efficient eating machine.

So this evening I headed toward the berries. When the mares saw the bowl in my hand, that was it. They mobbed me. I was irresistible.

So with mares in tow, I approached a berry bank. It was ravaged. Trampled. Haflinger poop piles everywhere. All that were left were some clusters of gleaming black berries up high overhead, barely reachable on my tip toes, and only reachable if I walked directly into the thicket. The mares stood in a little line behind me, pondering me as I pondered my dilemma.

I set to work picking what I could reach, snagging, ripping and bloodying my hands and arms, despite my sleeves. Pretty soon I had mares on either side of me, diving into the brambles and reaching up to pick what they could reach as well, unconcerned about the thorns that tore at their sides and muzzles. They were like sharks in bloody water–completely focused on their prey and amazingly skilled at
grabbing just the black berries, and not the pale green or red ones.

Plump Haflingers and one *plumpish* woman were willingly accumulating scars in the name of sweetness.

When my bowl was full, I extracted myself from the brambles and contemplated how I was going to safely make it back to the barn without being mare-mugged. Instead, they obediently trailed behind me, happy to be put in their stalls for their evening hay, accepting a gift from me with no thorns or vines attached.

Clearly, thorns are part of our everyday life. Thorns stand in front of much that is sweet and good and precious to us. They tear us up, bloody us, make us cry, make us beg for mercy.

Yet thorns have been overcome. They did not stop our salvation, did not stop goodness raining down on us, did not stop the taste of sweetness given as a gracious gift.

If we hesitate, thorns only proliferate unchecked.

So, desperate and hungry, we dive right in, to taste and eat.