Riehlife Poem of the Day: Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating,” from “Mortal Acts, Mortal Words”—poetry of sounds!
Sign of the times: Google “blackberry” and what comes up is a mechanical device, not a fruit. To find the fruit on Google, you must type in “blackberry fruit.” Vis: more people have likely held Blackberry devices in their hands these days than have gone berrying and experienced the pleasures Kinnell describes in his delicious poem.
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BLACKBERRY EATING
Galway Kinnell[click for bio]
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words[click to own]
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.