Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell

| filed under: Poem, Poets, Galway Kinnell, Poetry, Poet, Poems

I blame Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell for my love of poetry. Here's one of Kinnell's most famous and most lovely poems.

Blackberry Stalk

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.