Blackberries by Margaret Atwood1
In the early morning an old woman is picking blackberries in the shade. It will be too hot later but right now there’s dew. Some berries fall: those are for squirrels. Some are unripe, reserved for bears. Some go into the metal bowl. Those are for you, so you may taste them just for a moment. That’s good times: one little sweetness after another, then quickly gone. Once, this old woman I’m conjuring up for you would have been my grandmother. Today it’s me. Years from now it might be you, if you’re quite lucky. The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother’s. I’ve passed them on. Decades ahead, you’ll study your own temporary hands, and you’ll remember. Don’t cry, this is what happens. Look! The steel bowl is almost full. Enough for all of us. The blackberries gleam like glass, like the glass ornaments we hang on trees in December to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow. Some berries occur in sun, but they are smaller. It’s as I always told you: the best ones grow in shadow.
Revival by Luci Shaw2
March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn't softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night, but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion.
Jairus by Michael Symmons Roberts3
So, God takes your child by the hand and pulls her from her deathbed. He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’ You give her fruits with thick hides – pomegranate, cantaloupe – food with weight, to keep her here. You hope that if she eats enough the light and dust and love which weave the matrix of her body will not fray, nor wear so thin that morning sun breaks through her, shadowless, complete. Somehow this reanimation has cut sharp the fear of death, the shock of presence. Feed her roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread: forget the herbs, she has an aching fast to break. Sit by her side, split skins for her so she can gorge, and notice how the dawn draws colour to her just-kissed face.
The Clayjar Review’s spring issue, “Practice Resurrection,” will be fully ripened for your reading on March 21st, 2024.
We have been absolutely delighted by the submissions we received for this issue and are eager for them to bask in the light soon.
Be well & be vibrant, dear readers.
With warmth,
The Clayjar Team
If you enjoy what we’re doing here at The Clayjar, here are a few ways you can support us!
1
Margaret Atwood, Dearly: New Poems, 2020.
2
Luci Shaw, What the Light Was Like: Poems, 2006.
3
Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus, 2004.
Cover image: John Henry Twachtman, End of Winter, after 1889, oil on canvas, sourced from Smithsonian American Art Museum.