Blackberries

by Richard MacWilliam

In the cool chill of a morning

Dew-lapped, birch bark curling proud and the scent of autumn,

I whistled my name to the still sky

Quite certain

Of fields full sleeping,

Black tears wept,

In rabbit-paw copses dreaming by the old pond

As the sun drew blood

And my feet

Turned and drifted me in a calling.

Then I had a brother,

Moulded in the songs of infancy, full of delight,

And my spark touched fire and burnt his face

And we shrieked

To our mother’s song

In a bundling of frenzy

And ran for the dark oak by the barbed wire fence

To scrabble and duck

In our youth

Into the summered joy of the hunt

Running with the airy limbs

Of children playing castles in the green of the woods

And the wild sunshine smiles of the chased,

Past hazel,

Shadow of hawthorn,

The horse-mushroom patch and tree

Where the high pigeon stood its calls on the air

And there was I free

Of myself,

And in myself most freely given

 As we lightly played out our lives

In the emptiness of our understanding,

And troubled not the trees nor the world

With our weight

Of unseeing years :

And the morning was unspoken,

Unbroken, kissed by unseen hands controlling this,

The new-born moments

Together

Tumbled into childhood’s fractured bliss

Until we found a stony track,

Drifted slow, with switches flicking, broke the hollow back

Of time, dawdled on a mystery,

Spun out purpose,

Stretched our living rhyme

And walked towards our destiny:

And there, beneath the worn bones standing guard on fear

Where time had told

We began,

Beating out our song in morning’s light

As we strode like giants

Into the captured land our slung sticks framed,

Gathering silences for inspection,

Dissection,

Long-lost reflection

In the loneliness of quiet

Carved from the sun-buzzed nested briars our tired limbs made:

Until, at long last worn,

We were done:

Had called for the day, and won the morn.

Sharing more whimsical poetry with you one day at a time.

Shannon