by Margaret Yocom
For my grand-uncle Oliver Yocom (1884-1968)
He stands among the huckleberry bushes
in the thicket of dark green leaves
with his twelve-quart milk bucket.
The urn-shaped red flowers of spring are gone,
the bees and butterflies with them.
Come autumn, the leaves will turn orange, crimson.
He’s come for these black, spicy berries
no larger than the tip of his least finger,
worn from farm work, from corn and cows.
They drop him off after the milking
on their way to church
this Sunday, like every August Sunday.
Now it is just him, the birds, and the berries.
He picks them not by handfuls,
not by plucking a clump from a branch
but one after another,
one after another.
He has all the time he needs.
He pinches off each stem.
He knows his brother’s wife will drop
his clean, completely picked-clean berries
into applesauce and pies, right away—
there’s no keeping them very long,
these tiny August offerings.
He raises his purple-black hands to his lips.
There are no thorns.
::
Margaret Yocom grew up in the Pennsylvania German farmland listening to her grandparents’ stories. She is the author of ALL KINDS OF FUR: Erasure Poems & New Translation of a Tale from the Brothers Grimm (Deerbrook Editions, 2018). Folklorist and storyteller, her poetry has also appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Beltway Poetry Journal, the anthology The Folklore Muse, and elsewhere. She has also published on the Brothers Grimm, the folk arts of political protest, Inuit storytelling in northwest Alaska, family folklore, and on the folk arts of western Maine logging communities. Co-founder of the American Folklore Society’s Creative Writing & Storytelling Section, she holds a Ph.D. in English and Folklore from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She founded the Folklore Program of George Mason University where she taught for 36 years. She lives in Farmington, Maine, with her geologist husband. http://margaretyocom.com
Image: Kyle Bushnell
ID: green leaves in sunlight and shade.
Psaltery & Lyre 