Blueberry Season, 1976

As the marsh swelters in August, it begins:
the sweet, dappled stain on our hands, the languid shadows.
Three languages between us. One endless task. Each berry
rolling heavily from the stem with drowsy liquid thuds.
When you're fourteen, and walk a summer under this buzzing canopy,
bathed in dusky racemes, the burgeoning winter is impossible
and irrelevant as adulthood. And you, a refugee
of the war, tossing berries high to catch in your mouth, laughing with glee

Eileen Walsh Duncan grew up in the Seattle Area. Her work has appeared in regional online and print literary journals.