The sun scoured the horizon until the sky bled, <br />a scarlet strip of grit. <br />We wandered through a valley <br />where vacant swings dipped, <br />stilled in the early evening mist; <br />the slides were glossed grey, <br />slick as quicksilver. Our children <br />played there once. <br /> <br />The blackberry bushes parted <br />as though you were Moses, I carried <br />the warm limp of your hand in mine. <br />There we found twilight. <br />The fruit perfumed its corridors, <br />the branches snagged us like desperate talons, <br />the leaves burned dark, <br />the shadows of corpses. <br /> <br />The boughs closed in around us, <br />the drawn drapes after some theatrical parade. <br />There were so many of them, deep <br />purple and so fat they could have passed <br />as plums, bleeding their corpuscles <br />like a damage, a wound. The long savage <br />shadows crept upon them to darken <br />my corners. I remembered myself inwardly. <br /> <br />I lay down in a bed of nettles, <br />a thorny duvet that stung my skin; <br />the berries hovered round me like wasps, <br />the grass was soft. The bushes were archives <br />housing the swarms of tiny insects that <br />roused on meshed wings beneath <br />the crunch of our footfalls. <br />I could have inhaled them like dust.<br /><br />Caroline Misner<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-dusk/
