Brambles

After work headed along the Union Canal and then a bit along the Water of Leith looking for brambles. It was quite a slow trip because I stopped every time I spotted a promising looking bush. Most of them aren't ready, which means that there are still weeks of eating brambles ahead.

Whenever I pick brambles I recollect a poem that I read in Higher English about them. I didn't remember the whole poem, but it obviously struck some sort of chord with me and I found it on google.

Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney 

 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.

I think this poem is supposed to be about growing up and realising that things don't last. I'm not sure I have really grown up. I want to be one of the excited ones picking blackberries like thickened wine, with pink stained fingers. I will be disappointed in a few weeks too, when the last of them are gone.