Summer's blood

August passed in a slow sequence of cooking, cleaning, catering and caring for guests, visitors, holiday makers and customers. There was little time for much else.

Now September is here, one of the best of months to my mind. Summer winds down and, according to your species, thoughts of migration, hibernation or preservation are the order of the day. Mornings still glitter with early sunshine and the evening sky dissolves into coral and turquoise but the hedgerows are awash with fruit. I picked almost 4 pounds of blackberries today and an equal number of plum-damsons.

A great sadness for me has been the death two days ago of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The world is a poorer place without his artistry, his generosity and his humanity but he has left us the magic of his words. This is what he wrote about blackberry picking in an early poem typically drawing upon his own rural childhood.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.


Sinister associations subvert the charm and the remainder of the poem describes the stealthy rot that destroys the berries; death and decay are never far from late summer pleasures.

Maybe it's my Slavonic heritage but this blip from Russia seemed to me to encapsulate the changing season in a particularly poignant fashion.

I haven't been very successful in keeping abreast of blip journals. Apologies if yours is not one of the very many I have, with regret, not managed to visit over the past month.
I'm aiming to add a few back blips from August.