Blackberry Eating

A neighbor up the street is a poet, so naturally you'd expect him to have a poetry box on a post outside his home. And he does. I noticed the other day that he'd posted a new poem in the box, and it's perfect for the season.

Blackberry Eating
By Galway Kinnell

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 and squinched,
many-lettered, on-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.