Blackberry Eating

It is haircut time of year; new shoes, back to school, a bouquet of freshly sharpened #2 pencils, a brand new notebook, and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper (they always taste better to me).

So I got a haircut but I still need to get the notebook and some wax paper to wrap sandwiches (and Oreo cookies but not applesauce). I put a new sticker on my car, University of Maryland for my beamish boy.

And the sun is setting just a little earlier every day, every day until the winter solstice (my favorite night of the year). Then the nights will grow leaner and the daylight hours more full. It’s the defining moment. Another favorite, like September. I wait for September. It's okay to begin again now.

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.
- Gallway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating