Blues For Raspberries

[ or Rain Blues for Raspberries]

Rain! The rain! Unseasonal rain!
The rain comes in December
washing out harvest, an advent water
across allotment farms in our red ranges
full of rain on the berries at picking time
No thanks. We don't need it.

we drip out a fashion,
stiff in wetweather gear,
plastic rainhat, oilskin raincoat,
kneelong gumboots
plastic waterproofs
styled like body nappies

The rain comes like God's sendoff!
It drizzles enough between showers
The fruit is up, but the rain comes down.

We lift our arms to receive the crop
and water runs down our wrists
and drips out the cloth on our elbows.

Above the unmoppable mud
the canes a thick with showers
dripping juices into our hair
our sleeves dribble like house gutters
our feet slip around like mops
unable to get clean

Soft fruit, soft earth, soft flesh
Softened in the continuous baptism
Of soaking rain, the foliage is a river,
Drips fall from our ears, lobes glisten
eyebrows are covered in fine dew
and noses cling to a drop of silver

We pick over the mouldering
with wet sleeves, In wet coats
and bobby-hats, Oilskins sopping .

Our arms as pink as babies from the bath
Our legs as soft as boyhood genitals
the soft fruit slumps unfelt between
the soft sponges of our fingers
water-softened berries shake free
each touch sends a scatter down
for fruit stems have gone soggy
in lukewarm summer rain.

Our wooden punnet carriers are dumb
leaden with clay, stuck with
sod biscuits underneath, becoming cakes,
the punnets are swollen and sodden
the weight on youthful shoulders is heavy,
raincoats weigh double, our gumboots
are boats of mud, puntwide,
outriggered with loaves of mud.

We trudge through the yeast
of our own cultivation, but in
a trial of unrising red dough
all uplift is on us
with no pickerswho freely come

Every complaint is soundproofed
in the sponging of the earth...
Every pluck is doubtful,
even red fruit is pale pink,
select berries rot in punnets,
ten days with no let-up,
we can't wait for stopping of rain
this is all our year's crop...

Just us family hands, farm children
too few to get the pick off,
we work wet, on in the wet,
work ripe for wet
farm children like produce ourselves
we plod on where dust turned to slurry,
now tractor skid, the truck would slide away,
we must carry, carry on.

The tractor slides on the slip-hills,
we must carry on, carry up all we pick
punnets are yoked to our bones
we flounder around in the slips
we take up berries in rain-jam
like fruits ourselves, washed-out
pale for the market
but still paid, those peace rates
that slew off to a pittance

In the rain that weighs down the tally
is my birthday... It was my birthday!
and then in a three days it is Christmas
so the raspberries can
fall to waste... we'll make
no attempt to pick for
just one rainy day.

29 December 1996 © Wayne David Knoll