In the Garden

By Mary Grace Mangano

            for Mirjana

            after Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking”

Mid-June, in damp grass after heavy rain,
with baskets tied to our waists, explaining
how honeyberries taste, you showed me where
to go. We knelt to pick, as if in prayer—
like Moses and the burning bush. Like him,
I didn’t understand. We felt the skin
to see if they were ripe—soft as a cheek.
They practically fell off. Earlier that week,
we’d picked small beetles off of apple trees
until our cups were filled and hoped disease
would not take down the orchard, hoped they’d grow
despite the things that threaten life, encroaching
unseen. The sun was thick, the berries that
we harvested all stained my jeans, their fat
skins bursting on the ground like blood, and we
raised open palms to beetle-burdened trees.

All week, we picked and spoke of poetry.
You write it, too. I started, then, to see
how you were teaching me how not to give
up, like Limón says, to unfurl a fist,
to take it all, the hurt, the mess, the stains,
to pick the beetles off, to offer pain,
to gather berries when they’re soft, to taste
them after rain—for nothing is a waste.

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Mary Grace Mangano is a poet, writer, and professor. Her poetry has been published in New Verse Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, and The Windhover, among others, and her essays and reviews appear in places such as Plough, Comment, and Front Porch Republic. She lives in New Jersey.