Karen Green
Blackberrying
One of those gorgeous warm September days
perfect for picking blackberries on the Heath.
We're all vagrants snatching at the hedge,
grabbing the plumpest fruit.
Oak leaves colour pink and gold,
acorns bunch - clusters of bright black
elderberries catch the eye,
rosehips bulge, longing to be pulled
but we're only here to take blackberries.
My fingers and mouth bruise
from the juice I surreptitiously
suck and lick away. Bare arms
snag with brambles a dozen times
for each prize, often not worth
the scratch and tear. How stunted
and deformed the berries are!
Sometimes nature doesn't work,
sometimes it takes a pill to jerk the leaden
psyche into overdrive.
Sometimes you have to fumble.
Karen Green (poems and selection of illustrations) lives in North-west London.
Page(s) 20
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The