Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Words "fall almost unbidden to my tongue . . ."


       . . . as anyone reading this blog must know.  And so I'm very happy to find once again this unmatchable poem of images and sounds by Galway Kinnell:


Blackberry Eating

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.


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