Blackberry Picking by Sheamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

But first just one, a glossy purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

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, peatins, 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 ice. Our hands were peppered with thornpricks, our palms, sticky as bluebeards.

We halted the fresh berries in the buyer, but when the bath was filled we found a fur,

a rat-gray fungus glutting on our cash. 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 can falls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep. New they would not.

So I'm indebted to Jim Bridgman who pointed out on Twitter that

Sheamus Heaney had written that fantastic poem about Blackberry picking.

That wasn't me remembering that. I'd never read it before but I think it's a beautiful poem

and a not a bad way to start this podcast. Although in a way I could have saved it,

couldn't I to put right at the end for our meditative bit where we sent the run off to sleep

might have been the better idea.

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