Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

Blackberry-Picking

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

for Philip Hobsbaum

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 stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked 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 Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking 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 canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

(painting: Harold Harvey, The Blackberry Harvest )

Easter, Again: Learning to See the Obvious

It was a series of three dark-grey, cold spring days; the kind that make you doubt Easter really has happened yet, though the celebrations have come and gone. A dull torpor with a slight whiff of sickness had settled over the family, the kind that makes you want to sleep long into the morning and indulge in a long nap later anyway. Despite this heaviness, there were things that needed to be done that week, and we did them – dishes, work shifts, making meals, bedtimes for our four-year-old son who was also clearly under the weather. On Sunday afternoon, we dragged ourselves into the car to go out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. We had been planning to go for weeks, but for whatever reasons (our mood, the weather's mood), it seemed onerous. 

Driving across the brightly-green grounds, our eyes began to be enlivened again to beauty. But after an hour or two of milling around and dodging wet and windy moments, it seemed like work and we were nearing the end of our visit. I had a speech prepared in my mind, something like well, I guess we did our duty. (How sad, in retrospect. Beauty is not an item checked off a to-do list; she will not stand for it!) 

Instead of leaving straight away, however, we decided to do the Three-Mile Drive, a winding car path which displays many of the highlights of the place on the way out of the park. Through the raindrops on the windows, we glimpsed flowering crabapple orchards in a huge spectrum of pinks and purples, a mini mountain-ash forest florescent with buds, and a peaceful Chinese garden lying dormant in the spring rain. Finally, we came to the sculpture garden, which I hadn't seen in years and, in any case, didn't remember very well at all. My son couldn't see from his carseat, so we decided to brave the chilly outdoors for a few minutes so I could point out an articulable sculpture to him, which I knew he would love. 

We whisked ourselves up through the wet carpet of grass and I showed the sculpture to him which I thought would intrigue him, but he kept saying, look Mama, look up there. And I looked, and I saw this up on the hill above us:

And he said to me, let's go up there, mama. It looks like a playground ! I waded through the switches of grass, trying to keep up with him and his enthusiasm, while trying to explain that we couldn't climb on these sculptures (as you can in the fantastical rural Minnesota sculpture park known as Franconia). We got to the place and stared at it. I looked down at the plaque, and it said: “Construction (Crucifixion).” Ah-ha. Leo, I said, trying to sound natural and not too teacherly, this is a picture of where Jesus died on the cross. He reached his arms up for me to hold him, wanting to be close to me, and also higher up to see. Once near, he pointed matter-of-factly at the circle and said, Ok, mama. Then is that the stone that was rolled away?  

I stood there in the wind and rain, thunderstruck, awoken. That was the answer to the question I'd been inwardly turning over and over for days, vaguely conscious of my grief and confusion. Here was a cross, on a hill, on a gloomy grey day, one which hardly felt like we were on the winning side of Easter. And yet here was my small boy, instinctively and spiritedly reaching for the most obvious interpretation of the whole picture. The glorious sun-halo and the centerpiece of the cross must indeed be the resurrection. It dominates the whole thing. Suffering, gloom, difficulty, plain-old human weariness may feel like it's prevailing, but the little ones have been given the kingdom, and they can see the obvious, and they will tell us if we have ears to hear and eyes to see. I spun him around, and jumped up and down in the swishy water at our feet saying yes, you are right, you're absolutely right! as the imposing structure stretched above us held our only sunshine, the unshakeable hope that the stone's been rolled away. 

Note: For those of you who looked at the picture above and thought - Mondrian! - good for you, too. My husband came climbing up after us a few minutes later and thought the same thing. Barbara Hepworth, the sculptor, was purposefully doing an homage to Piet Mondrian. Though you see it here in the photo with a luminous blue circle, the reflection of the lighting as we first approached it looked a dull yellow. So, was it a sun, a stone, or both? I also found out later that we were approaching it from the back, which accentuated the dominance of the circle. The front of the sculpture is crossed by the lines of the cross, which is also interesting, but I like to think that we came upon in the exact way that we needed to on that particular day, with the shining yellow sun unhindered on a literally very cloudy day. 

Abbey von Gohren

is a full-time lover of the world. Her tools are her magnifying glass, binoculars, a pen, and five senses, all of which were gifts from her parents. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and small son and can't help but write poems about all of these things.

An Unanticipated Hiatus

Dear Commonplacers,

Firstly, I write this to all of you realizing that I have failed at getting you The Sunday Book newsletters for many, many weeks now. For this I apologize. But I wanted to reach out now to tell you that this is what my nightstand has looked like for several weeks now, four months to be exact:

My nightstand

And so this is the reason for the unexpected hiatus. The little person growing inside of me has been working diligently to become as healthy as possible, and this means that I have had dwindling energy to give to all of you here, The Commonplace Living community. This unexpected hiatus has caused me to slow down and simplify, and for at least the first four months that meant that slowly Commonplace Living came to a halt. The morning hours, evening hours, and weekend hours that I had been excitedly devoting to Commonplace soon were filled with very, very long naps, sleeping in as late as possible before getting to work, just sitting and taking it in (all the joy and wonder, but also the fear and feeling of being overwhelmed).

So if you’ve been waiting for the next wonderful poem by Beth Kephart, I apologize. If you’ve been waiting for another book recommendation or poem from Mr. Peasley’s desk, or painting to explore, I apologize. Instead I’ve been sleeping, trying to eat, resting, getting advice from dear friends and family, processing, dealing with back pain, avoiding the smell of shellfish and also getting a chance to catch up on The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place (I feel very connected with Lady Constance this time around!) and I owe the inspiration for the title of this email to the wonderful mind behind this series, Maryrose Wood.

However, this post is not to say goodbye, or to say that the project will be halted forever, instead it’s to fill you in on what’s been going on this side of the web, to apologize for the absence, but also to let you know that I do hope to continue, particularly as the summer and my second trimester are finally here! Here’s to more posts in the near future! (and do know that I have tried to continue posting on social media even during these last few months, so there’s always gathered articles and paintings there for you too!)

All the best,

Jess

A dancer: a painting

The Art Institute of Chicago

Image: [Now on view in Gallery 226A] Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. Danseuse rose (Pink Dancer, 1878. Anonymous loan.

Wick Inside Flame: A Poem

Wick Inside Flame

Later, the seahorse,

Long-snouted and swooned

Into its green corset of glass,

Dangled from a nail

In our kitchen window,

And when the sun

Eclipsed the horizon,

It pinked.

It had been what we’d taken for ourselves,

From a room of fragile things,

In a shop on the river on a day

When again it was the three of us,

And we were accumulating time

For after this.

We’d walked the canal first,

Behind the poet’s house. Walked

Lambertville and the bridge

Above the Delaware,

And we’d called the white geese

Swans, for the romance of it,

And leaned to catch a feather,

And said to each other,

Or I said to you,

I remember snowdrops.

Last night, washing my hands

Of the lavender I had planted

And watching the seahorse pink

Above the sink, I stole this image

Of ourselves from the day we had

Squandered so that we might be saved:

You brushing my hair from my face

For a kiss, our son too tall to tame.

“When the Children have Gone to Bed,” Carl Larsson (1895, Sweden).

This is the second of five poems shared specifically with Commonplace Living’s readers written by award winning author Beth Kephart.

---

Beth Kephart

wrote poems before she wrote books. Then she wrote poems while writing books. Now she writes poems because they force her to find and say the one singular thing that she still hopes to find a way to say. Her essays, books, teaching, and thoughts can be found at bethkephartbooks.com

Milkweeds: a painting

Milkweeds, 1876, watercolor by Fidelia Bridges (American, 1834-1923). 

Why it is May!

The Frog and Toad stories are some of my favorites from childhood. They are playful, of the earth, adventurous tales that simply sweep you up. Here’s a nice reminder I came across recently, that it is in fact May!

Enjoy the May flowers and showers. The gray days and blue skies. May is a time of transition, with new life emerging and a season dying away. Maybe pick up a Frog and Toad story and settle in.

The Inevitable Resurrection: The Way of All Things

What is this atomic gift of a body, hands, eyes, feet and ears, a seed of? We’ve inherited the cells that make up our being as a mysterious gift from the universe: what we give back in our lifetime can be the fruit of that seed, the fruit of the seeds sown by the parents who suffered to bear and raise us. And now, our free acts of love and reconciliation might bear fruit that we might not even imagine. This is the tiny seed of faith that can grow the enormous mustard tree.

The Way governs all things, so whether we love others or not, whether we like it or not, nature will turn us back into a new gift: blades of grass in which the grasshoppers rest, or branches from which birds proclaim their songs. No matter what we do, the universe will extract its once invested love back from us. But we all have the freedom to increase the yield, not just yield a zero sum game. Therefore the call to love one another is not a choice among many. Rather, it is the inevitable course of all things. Our submission to the Way, then, produces an abundance of good things, not just a sustaining of the status quo of biological life, but the presence of the resurrection here and now.

To quote Hieromonk Damascene from Christ The Eternal Tao :

"What was this course that all things followed? No thing existed for itself. Each thing humbly, patiently fulfilled its designation, without thinking, without possessing, or rebelling, or complaining, or laying blame, or taking credit, or seeking honor. One thing dies, without thinking, that others may live. A seed falls to the ground and dies, and from it comes a tree bearing fruit and more seeds beyond counting. If the seed is preserved whole, nothing will come from it. Only if it dies will it give life. This is the Way, the Pattern that all things follow...If each thing that is made serves another, And all things serve the whole, Does not the Way serve, also? If all created things (save man) humbly, patiently fulfill the designation of their existence on earth, Should not the Way ['Christ' the 'Logos'] do the same?"

painting: Doroga (translated, The Road), by Konstantin Kryzhitsky, 1899.

---

Jonathan Peasley

didn't know that he loved poetry until he heard Bjork sing "i will wade out" by ee cummings when he was a sophomore in high school. Since then, he has been on the hunt for those who capture in words those lightning flashes of the liminal and sublime that a moment presents. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, two children, and an idiosyncratic cat and dog. He teaches junior high and high school humanities classes at a private school.

The Ministrations of the Moon: A Poem

The Ministrations of the Moon

And then it rained no more,
Save in the domes beneath the leaves,

And through the tin of downspouts

And from a stranger’s sleeves.  The birds

Had seen it coming — the finch

And morning dove, the ordinary robin—

And the squirrels had gone off

Like slingshot ammunition, hurtling

Between trees. The storm interfered

With the dying of the day. There was dark

Without the benefit of dusk, and then those star

Tattoos and, last, the ministrations

Of the moon. If you were anywhere you were

Watching from your own kitchen window

Through your own green eyes,

For that’s where the likeness is between us:

In the jewel set of our eyes. I learned

Watching from you: Yeast to rise,

Sun to set, rain to rinse,

Forgiveness.  

This is the first of five poems shared specifically with Commonplace Living’s readers written by award winning author Beth Kephart. Four more poem posts to come.

Beth Kephart

wrote poems before she wrote books. Then she wrote poems while writing books. Now she writes poems because they force her to find and say the one singular thing that she still hopes to find a way to say. Her essays, books, teaching, and thoughts can be found at bethkephartbooks.com

Girl with Peaches: A Painting Reflection

Girl with peaches. Valentin Serov, 1887.

Serious eyes. What have we interrupted? This little girl sits at a table, simple white cloth, the sheen of the butter knife, the pressure of her fingers on the ripe peach. And yet, she has paused, no juice has spilled out of the fuzzy flesh of fruit, or slid down her wrist onto her pink sleeve. The day, the leaves with light shining peak in behind her to, trying to see what is happening, or maybe illuminating it for us? There is a serious sadness in her eyes, does she want to whisper secrets to this piece of creation? Or is she waiting until we leave so she can devour it herself? Within this frame there is the whimsy of childhood in the polka-dot bow and pink blouse, the newness of life, but also the passing of time, the day is ending, life moves forward, can she resist the sadness of the miniature soldier at her shoulder? What do we tell her?