Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by an Irish poet named Seamus Heaney. He lived from 1939 to 2013.

He was a recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was called by several people.

It's the greatest poet of our age.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Blackberry Picking.

Goes like this.

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

At 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 the 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 tracked 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 eyes.

Our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as bluebeards.

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

a rat-gray fungus glutting on our cache.

The juice was sinking 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 canvils smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep.

...