Summer Blackberries Past

One summer my sister Gabi and I found a blackberry patch in the far reaches of our suburban DC neighborhood and we spent several hours over a two day period gathering the plump fruit--popping most into our mouths but managing to save just a few to show my mother when she came home from work.

One of my favorite memories is the precise pleasure of the sweet fruit bursting in my mouth while the hot August air pressed in on me.

So imagine my joy when I saw Maya Papaya's offering for today's ten-line tuesday poem:

"blackberries
it is not for nothing that I am here,
deep in a thicket of punishing brambles,
reaching at an awkward angle for the fruit
left at the far branches after a weekend's easier picking.
dark globes dangle like gumdrops, redolent with promise,
which is why I can ignore my ankles, tracked red
in the wake of low thorns, and why I don't even care
bees are hovering nearby, filling their own primordial hunger.
I will take this inconvenient pain, this careful science of patience
guiding me, at last, to the ripest of things."

Those last two lines... damn!