Blackberry Picking in Kentucky

 

Ashy legs dangled 

from my grandfather’s weather-beaten flatbed,

wooden boards blanched from too many seasons of tobacco, potatoes, and corn.

 

A harvest of cousins, aunts, and uncles piled on with all manner of rinsed bucket

as my grandfather slowly dragged us into the woods to find wild blackberry bushes.

 

It was the hard red berries that gave the bushes with bruise-colored clusters away.

We — sticky with sweat

warned to watch for thorns

and snakes — 

reached into the thicket to the promised obsidian clumps.

 

The flesh yielded beneath our fingertips as we 

plucked and plopped the bouncy fruit into

pails.

It wasn’t a race because there were so many berries among the thorns,

and for the children

Time meant nothing.

Our voices joined the birds and frogs as we

blew on and ate a few of the more irresistible drupelets

pressing the balls of the fruit to the roof of our mouths until they were

flooded with juice sweet and tart like memories.

 

When all the buckets were heavy laden with fruit,

we meandered home.

With fingers stained the color of sacrifice,

We offered the buckets to my grandmother

to be made into a plethora of dark and delicious things.