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Saint Francis and the Sow
by Galway Kinnell
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Sign of the times: Google "blackberry" and what comes up is a mechanical device, not a fruit. To find the fruit on Google, you must type in "blackberry fruit." Vis: more people have likely held Blackberry devices in their hands these days than have gone berrying and experienced the pleasures Kinnell describes in his delicious poem.

Read my Riehlife account of berrying here "Country Mouse...berrying...pie for dinner on the screened-in porch". ---JGR

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BLACKBERRY EATING
Galway Kinnell[click for bio]
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words[click to own]

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.