Blackberry Eating
By Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
--------
I had a weird Thursday morning getting defriended on social media by someone I've known nearly 20 years online for posting and then defending the use of AI in fan art, something I feel very differently about than the use of AI in filmmaking, graphic design, or any professional artistic endeavor, just as I feel very differently about selling fan fiction vs. posting fan fiction to AO3. We're in a tenuous moment in how creators, creations, and consumers intersect, I have been following the AI art debate very closely, and I am very conscious of my own lines for what I find problematic.
Anyway, the rest of my day involved gorgeous weather, the first couple of episodes of the new season of the heartwarming Heartstopper, tonight's What We Do in the Shadows, and the absolute magnificence that is the Strange New Worlds musical episode, providing the answer I didn't know I needed to the question, "What if Douglas Adams and Stephen Schwartz wrote an episode of Star Trek?" I chatted with my Thursday night fangirl friends too and walked to the beach in spectacular weather! Blackberries grow everywhere here in August:
No comments:
Post a Comment