Picking RaspberriesWe are picking raspberries in the bramble tangle that your carefully tended bed has become. After all those years giving… this was the place for savoring this home you called summer... staying from spring to fall. You couldn’t come this year or last. We phoned to ask permission your frail voice cheerful with consent. The thunderstorm prowls impulsive strangely indecisive. We pick with familiar greed— sometimes from the litter of fallen purpled fruit we pinch pink almost-ripe till they release because we won’t be back in time. We lift arches expose hidden berry clans plunder till they stain our hands then turn like memory back down the same row for the unnoticed and unseen. Strangers have already been here trampled vines.
Wonderful to see this view and understanding of the world given space, oxygen and value. So deeply important to keep feeding, sharing and validating goodness.
A beautiful tribute to the land, Van and Lucille. This line went straight to my core: "I think of Van and Lucille’s lives as the fertile soil in which democracy flourishes."
So much love packed into that single line. Love Love Love!!!
Reading this poem and the one from your uncle has given me a connection to the everyday yet very joyous events our years bring us.
We all have people and shared rituals that tie us together.
Why not picking berries, aging and embracing our becoming pass’e if we were ever anything but.
Each life and its human encounters define us in some way.
The violent deaths that were brought about by innocent and well meaning people trying to support other human beings is uniting us in tears, horror and a feeling of intense betrayal by our current governments agenda.
Wonderful to see this view and understanding of the world given space, oxygen and value. So deeply important to keep feeding, sharing and validating goodness.
A beautiful tribute to the land, Van and Lucille. This line went straight to my core: "I think of Van and Lucille’s lives as the fertile soil in which democracy flourishes."
So much love packed into that single line. Love Love Love!!!
Reading this poem and the one from your uncle has given me a connection to the everyday yet very joyous events our years bring us.
We all have people and shared rituals that tie us together.
Why not picking berries, aging and embracing our becoming pass’e if we were ever anything but.
Each life and its human encounters define us in some way.
The violent deaths that were brought about by innocent and well meaning people trying to support other human beings is uniting us in tears, horror and a feeling of intense betrayal by our current governments agenda.
Thank you so much, Cathy, for your open heart, deep caring, and love of justice!
Our democracy is under threat. Our way of life. Who will pick the raspberries, if not a hand?
Thank you, Lisa. So much that we cherish, and often take for granted, is at risk.
Beautiful, Scudder!
How nice to read your poem and Van’s side-by-side.
And to discover, in his poem, how I am learning similar things to what he describes in my own advancing age…
Lovely post!
🙏🏼🔥💙
Thank you, Mac. Van's poems were mostly self-published...I don't know where we can get copies of them....I find them wonderful!
What a heartwarming post and poem. So helpful in these dark and cruel days. Thank you!
Thank you so much Ann!