These blackberry-pickers store their stash in a cowshed, yet always, despite their best efforts at preservation, the berries start to rot. They fill the buckets first with the greener, less ripe berries, and then top them off with the ripest ones. They hunt everywhere – through hayfields, cornfields, and briars – staining and scratching their hands as they search. They get a bunch of buckets and whatever else will hold the berries, and set off to pick as many as they can. After the first ripe berry is eaten, it's so sweet that the blackberry-pickers have to have more. At first, a lot of them are still green and hard, but some are red (getting there) and a few are perfectly ripe and purple. It arrives carefully wrapped, un-matted and unframed.It's late August which means it's primo blackberry conditions – tons of rain and sun, and the blackberries are slowly starting to ripen. About your print: Printed professionally on high quality photographic paper (NOT cheap card stock!) with a lustre finish (beautifully matte with a slight sheen), using archival inks that will last for years. MEDIUM: Fine art print (UNFRAMED) SIZE: Please choose from drop down menu Choose either black with white writing or white with black writing. That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.Įach year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.īut when the bath was filled we found a fur,Ī rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Until the tinkling bottom had been covered We trekked and picked until the cans were full, Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Poem: Blackberry-Pickingįor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.Īmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.
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