Hedge School

'Though that hir soules goon a-blakeberyed.'
Chaucer, 'The Pardoner's Prologue'

The walk home from school got longer
those first weeks of September,
listening to the mini bus diminish
through the hedges and trees,
then slipping the straps of my bag over each shoulder
to free up both hands for the picking of blackberries.

Another lesson perhaps, this choice of how to take them.
One by one, tracing their variety on my tongue,
from the bitterness of an unripe red
tightly packed as a nervous heart,
to the rain-bloated looseness of those older,
cobwebbed and dusty as a Claret
laid down for years in a cellar.

Or to hoard them? Piling in the palm
until I cupped a coiled black pearl necklace,
a hedgerow caviar, the bubbles of just poured wine
stilled in my fingers which I'd take together,
each an eye of one great berry, a sudden symphony.

Or as I did just once, strolling towards the low house
growing at the lane's end,
not to eat them at all,
but slowly close my palm into a fist instead,
dissolving their mouthfeel over my skin
and emerging from the hedge and tree tunnel,
my knuckles scratched and my hand blue-black red,
as bloodied as a butcher's or a farmer's at lambing,
or that of a boy who's discovered for the very first time,
just how dark he runs inside.