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 black-berry eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell (Providence, Rhode Island, EE UU, 1927). Poeta y novelista. Premio Pulitzer de poesía (1982). Poeta Laureado del estado de Vermont (1989-1993).